OBBB and beyond: Drive strategy with localized insights
Article | October 3, 2025
Reading time: 3 mins
As the dust settles following passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), the contours of a shifting healthcare landscape are taking shape. True, the industry has faced headwinds before but, as outlined in a recent article published by Vizient, never quite like this. Health system leaders need to anticipate impacts beyond what is immediately apparent and navigate an environment with a multitude of possible future states. To succeed, organizations will need to balance the needs of emerging challenges while continuing to identify and prioritize high-confidence, bold strategic bets to accelerate transformational change.
Strategy’s role: Anticipate, localize, prioritize, communicate
Complex. Overwhelming. Wait and see. We hear these phrases during conversations with client organizations on the topic of the current policy and payment landscape. Most leadership teams, having navigated pandemic-era disruptions, updated their tool kit to include enhanced signal monitoring, agile decision-making and stricter resource management. Though helpful in the past, these efforts won’t be sufficient moving forward.
Beyond the collective industry experience of first-order impacts — utilization disruption and financial pressure — seen in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations expect the OBBB and future regulatory efforts to produce second- and third-order impacts that are not yet clearly identified or quantified. In response, an internal, multidisciplinary flywheel that combines signal gathering and scenario planning efforts with real-time business and clinical monitoring is needed to elevate each organization’s ability to pivot immediately. This full-field approach requires strategists, operators, clinicians and finance leaders to work together and leverage integrated data to chart a path forward.
Sg2 recommends leaders take the following steps to effectively anticipate and manage disruption.
- Act now. Don’t wait for perfect clarity. Develop localized, actionable tactics that can be applied with confidence across a variety of scenarios.
- Broaden focus. Evaluate clinical, operational and workforce implications — not just financial — across your System of CARE.
- Prioritize boldly. Meeting the challenges posed in the current landscape requires accelerated transformation and maximized systemness. Make strategic choices that reflect your mission and are grounded in the communities you serve.
- Communicate clearly. Ensure strategic intent is consistently shared across all levels.
Sg2’s annual Insurance Coverage Estimates evaluate zip code-level shifts across financial groups, inclusive of commercial, Medicare, Medicaid, Insurance Marketplace and uninsured. Accurately forecasting the evolution of insurance coverage locally allows for targeted patient support and effective resource allocation across the System of CARE.
The Vizient Clinical Data Base (CDB) provides a comprehensive view of hospital- and system-level results across key quality domains, including mortality, readmissions, complications, patient safety, and patient experience. By benchmarking performance against national peers and identifying variation in outcomes, CDB equips leaders with the insights needed to prioritize improvement initiatives, strengthen accountability, and drive measurable gains in clinical effectiveness and patient outcomes.
Imperatives key to flourishing in the face of OBBB challenges:
- Margin transformation
- Care delivery realignment
- Structural resilience
- Technological enablement