Vizient adopts Writer to accelerate high-quality, personalized, and compliant healthcare assets

Challenge

Vizient, the leader in healthcare performance improvement, provides growth strategy, care delivery, and expense management services to over half of the healthcare organizations in the United States. As part of the effort to elevate the technology and analytics capabilities of Vizient, the team evaluated generative AI solutions. At the helm of the project was Thomas Rogers, Vice President of Marketing Technology, Analytics, Research, and Operations. His primary goals were to enable Vizient to create custom marketing materials for multiple target personas, pull together disparate subject matter experts to build consumable assets on technical topics, and ensure all outputs were consistent and compliant.

Solution

The Vizient team evaluated Writer and a second generative AI vendor. They chose Writer not only for its generative AI capabilities, but also for its commitment to transparency and data privacy and its ability to automatically enforce Vizient’s legal and brand rules.

The Vizient team must address multiple personas, such as financial, clinical, and operational buyers. With Writer, they can easily map messages and service benefits for each audience and generate unique versions of marketing assets for all three personas. “We are now delivering the right content at the right time in the customer journey to each of financial, clinical, and operational buyers,” explains Rogers. “We would not have had the staff for that, nor would we have been able to prioritize it.”

In addition, Writer helps Vizient subject matter experts craft crisp, consistent, compliant thought leadership from the get-go, accelerating time to market without compromising on quality. Earlier this year, the team relied on Writer to assist nearly a dozen collaborators, including eight subject-matter experts, in creating the Vizient Pharmacy Market Outlook, a 60-page report that is considered the gold standard in the industry. Writer equipped collaborators, who were mostly pharmacists rather than marketers, with automated compliance guardrails and brand guidelines instantly in their workspaces, which led to a clear, accurate, and concise piece that the team produced in less time with fewer editing cycles than before.

Writer ensures all materials adhere to both regulatory healthcare guidelines and the company’s unique voice. “We recently launched an intentional shift in our brand voice,” says Senior Director, Brand Strategy and Thought Leadership Kelly Randall. “Our language is now much more approachable, and Writer helps us keep our voice consistent in both important pieces like the Pharmacy Market Outlook, and across the company generally.”

Results

Nearly a year in, Vizient is getting 4x the ROI results the team expected, and saving more than 100 collaborators nearly 2.5 hours a week each. The team projects year-one savings of $700,000. Beyond the productivity boost, the team is able to tackle net-new use cases with Writer, including mapping persona-based variations of assets for their website 1:1 personalization effort.

Finally, while user adoption isn’t always top of mind for vendor success, it was a big unlock for the Vizient team. “If you read the analyst reports, only about a third of users adopt new technology,” says Rogers. “We needed generative AI in the hands of content creators. Our brand team saw it as a key resource for our voice. But we didn’t have to twist arms to change behavior.”

“The mutual benefit was obvious,” adds Randall, “People got on board quickly. We’re now more than 100 users and growing.”

Next steps

Rogers and the Vizient team see a bright future for their generative AI strategy. Beyond training more people and enforcing learnings through help sessions and best practices workshops, they intend to AI-enable more channels, such as their account-based marketing system. They also intend to connect the Writer Knowledge Graph to key data sources to create more accurate, aligned assets and streamlining fact-checking across written materials.