Hospitals are under mounting pressure from rising supply costs, product shortages, and fragmented data. InterSystems and Ready Computing show how AI-driven decision intelligence can help healthcare supply chains move from reactive firefighting to initiative-taking orchestration, reducing procedure risk and improving operational confidence.
I had the opportunity to attend InterSystems READY 2026 global conference in Maryland. The event offered an environment rich in knowledge sharing, real-world customer stories, and a platform for sharing progress.
I participated in engaging sessions and learned how InterSystems supports its partners’ supply chain operations through data unification, automation, and artificial intelligence, enabling smarter decisions faster. I found myself in sessions discussing Agentic AI frameworks, developing agents from chatbots, and how to best leverage InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator.
How Ready Computing is leveraging decision intelligence and supply chain orchestration to avoid the cancellations of high-priority healthcare procedures.
One of the first sessions I attended was hosted by Chris Cunnane, Global Product Marketing Manager for Supply Chain at InterSystems, and Mike LaRocca, founder and CEO of Ready Computing. Chris Cunnane began by sharing a personal story reflecting on his job in college, where he was responsible for routing deliveries for a bedding retailer using:
A paper road atlas
A highlighter
An endless stream of traffic updates on the radio
No GPS, no real-time ETA updates, no emissions tracking, just manual planning, and best guesses. It worked “well enough” until the day a 13-foot box truck met a 10-foot bridge and had to turn around, barely making the final delivery on time. The point was clear: even a skilled human will hit limits without “the right data and tools.” That same gap exists today inside many hospital systems, and the stakes are far higher than late mattresses.
Recent market research shows three major pressures on hospital supply chains:
Rising supply costs & tight reimbursement
Product shortages & sourcing vulnerabilities
Data and technology gaps
This is classic logistics friction, except with life-and-death implications. Hospitals are effectively trying to run complex, high-risk logistics with equivalent “paper map”- level tools and data that aren’t connected between clinical and procurement systems. level tools and fragmented data. InterSystems helps its customers use decision intelligence to make supply chain and logistics decisions faster, reducing interruptions and cancellations of procedures in hospitals, boosting revenue, and getting people the care they need faster.
Decision Intelligence: Beyond Dashboards
Decision Intelligence (DI) goes a step beyond traditional analytics by transforming insights into actionable decisions. It combines data analysis, forecasting, scenario modeling, and human judgment to guide better business outcomes. With DI, organizations can move from simply understanding what is happening to actively deciding what to do next. For InterSystems customers, this means enabling more effective and timely decisions, such as placing orders, engaging with suppliers, managing inventory movement, and increasing operational visibility within a unified system.
Instead of firefighting shortages as surgeries near, AI models forecast demand, spot risks, and recommend adjustments before problems hit. In healthcare and logistics alike, the organizations that consistently make faster, smarter, data-informed decisions will outperform. At its core, decision intelligence connects (data + AI + people) into a continuous loop of better, more confident actions.
Decision intelligence understands the context behind the decisions that need to be made, including “who” is making the decision and “how often” it needs to be made. Next, data is pulled from multiple systems, such as operations, finance, and inventory, and analytics and AI are applied to formulate a recommendation. This recommendation is surfaced as a “one-click” decision or can be automated, depending on the customer’s preferences.
InterSystems is supporting its customers’ supply chain operations through two products:
InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator:
A decision intelligence platform with “out-of-the-box” data integration and interoperability that advances analytics and predictive models. Supply Chain Orchestrator has built-in generative AI capabilities that help supply chain professionals with tailored analytics for logistics and hospital operators.
InterSystems Data Studio with Supply Chain Model:
A Cloud-based, low-code data integration layer that harmonizes and normalizes data from disparate systems. Delivering clean, AI-ready data to the right users and applications that act as a “front-end data gateway” for supply chain solutions.
How Ready Computing is Leveraging Channels360 Supply Chain Edition and InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator
In the demo portion of the session, Ready Computing brought the hospital supply chain story to life by showing how their Channels360 platform operationalizes decision intelligence in a real-world surgical setting. Framed around the role of an Operating Room Materials Manager, the demo walked through an end-to-end workflow: creating a new patient case, scheduling a surgery, loading the surgeon’s detailed preference card, checking inventory, triggering AI-driven sourcing recommendations, routing items through sterilization, and finally assembling the surgical cart. What stood out was how Channels360 models this entire process as a configurable workflow (“channels” and tasks), combining human interaction where it matters with automated system tasks where it does not. Each step is logged as part of the case timeline, giving full traceability from scheduling to procedure.Channel360 is built on top of Supply Chain Orchestrator offering seamless integration. The Supply Chain edition introduces an orchestration-first model that connects upstream data with downstream execution. When the system identifies required supplies for a procedure, it calls out to Supply Chain Orchestrator, which consults inventory and supplier data, then returns ranked sourcing options that balance price, availability, delivery time, and historical reliability scores. The “control tower” view then layers on a 30-day forward-looking perspective across all upcoming procedures, highlighting items and cases at risk so teams can intervene early. The result is a compelling example of how InterSystems can deliver AI-assisted decision intelligence into a repeatable workflow that reduces last-minute scrambling, improves visibility, and helps hospitals execute surgical procedures with greater confidence and control.
InterSystems is a creative data technology provider that delivers a unified foundation for next-generation applications for healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and supply chain customers in more than 80 countries. Their flagship product, InterSystems IRIS data platform, is at the core of Supply Chain Orchestrator, which uses advanced data management, analytics, and integration features to offer tailored supply chain solutions. At the READY 2026 event, InterSystems demonstrated how its technology delivers decision intelligence to help hospitals minimize supply chain disruptions, improve reliability, and reduce mortality rates.
The post How AI-Driven Decision Intelligence Is Transforming Hospital Supply Chains appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.