Steve Valdiserri and the Work of Making Healthcare Actually Work

Healthcare is full of big promises. New care models. New technology. New systems meant to improve outcomes and lower costs.

But inside most organizations, the day-to-day reality looks completely different. Teams are stuck with broken workflows, confusing data, and systems that somehow create more work instead of less.

Steve Valdiserri has spent his career working on that problem.

Rather than focusing on buzzwords or theory, he has built his reputation around execution. His work centers on helping healthcare organizations take big ideas and actually make them work in real life — not on a slide deck, but in the clinics, call centers, and back offices where the work actually happens.

"We spent a lot of time asking simple questions," Steve says. "Who owns this process? What data do we trust? What is step 1, step 2, step 3? Are those even the right steps? Why? Those types of questions sound basic, but most organizations can't answer them clearly. And that's where everything starts to break down."

Early Leadership Lessons

Steve grew up in Indianapolis and attended Bishop Chatard High School, where he was part of two state championship football teams. The lessons from football stayed with him long after high school.

"In sports, excuses disappear fast. If one person misses an assignment, the whole play breaks down. You don't get to blame the system. You just have to do your job."

That mindset followed him to DePauw University, where he studied economics and became a four-year varsity football letterman and team captain.

"You learn discipline through repetition. The basics matter way more than people give them credit for. I was by no means the biggest or fastest guy on the field, but I focused on the basics, prepped like nobody else, and always put myself in the right position to make a play. That's still how I approach everything."

Those early experiences shaped the way he approaches leadership today. Clear communication. Accountability. Consistency. The boring stuff that actually wins.

Building a Career in Healthcare Operations

After college, Steve entered healthcare operations during a period when value-based care was becoming a major focus across the industry. Leaders were talking constantly about transformation. But Steve picked up on something early that has stayed with him ever since.

"In my early days, the strategy always sounded great in the room. But what I came to find out pretty quickly is that the hard part wasn't coming up with the strategy. It was actually putting it into practice and executing. That's where almost every initiative I saw was struggling."

In 2015, he joined VillageMD during its early growth phase. Over nearly ten years, he held leadership roles across operations and strategy before becoming Vice President of Value-Based Strategies. His work focused on scaling value-based care models and improving operational performance across complex healthcare systems.

That meant dealing with the kinds of problems most people outside healthcare never see. Patient attribution errors. Misaligned workflows. Data gaps. Teams working from completely different versions of the same report.

"One time we reviewed a patient population that looked totally fine on paper. After we actually cleaned the data, thousands of records were either duplicates or attributed to the wrong providers. We realized we'd been making decisions based on the wrong patient base for who knows how long."

Fixing that issue changed how the organization approached operational reviews moving forward.

"That's when you really start to understand... small operational problems become very expensive problems if you let them sit."

Why Execution Matters More Than Strategy

Steve believes healthcare organizations spend way too much time on planning and not nearly enough time understanding how work actually happens on the ground.

He has watched organizations pour resources into new platforms and reporting systems without ever fixing the workflows underneath them.

"We had meetings where teams reviewed dashboards for an hour. At the end, nobody could tell you what action we were supposed to take. That's not an analytics problem. That's a process problem... and it's everywhere."

That disconnect between data and action creates real frustration across organizations. Steve's approach is to simplify the system instead of layering more complexity on top of it. Map the workflow. Clarify ownership. Validate the data. Remove the steps that don't matter.

Simple ideas. Hard execution.

Launching Avanti Strategy Group

After nearly a decade at VillageMD, Steve decided to take those lessons and apply them more broadly by founding Avanti Strategy Group.

The firm focuses on healthcare strategy and operational execution. Steve works directly with healthcare and health technology organizations trying to improve performance without creating more confusion in the process.

"I wanted to stay close to the work. Not just talk about strategy from a distance. Actually get in there and help teams fix the problems."

Much of his work starts by understanding how organizations actually operate day to day, not how leadership thinks they operate.

"What people think is happening and what's actually happening are usually two completely different things. The gap between those two is where most of the value gets lost."

Steve Valdiserri on AI in Healthcare

Steve has also spent significant time studying AI and healthcare innovation. He completed an executive certification in AI in Healthcare through Harvard Medical School.

He believes AI has real potential — but only if organizations fix their operational basics first.

"AI won't fix broken processes. It'll just scale them faster. That's the part everyone keeps missing in the rush to adopt the latest tools."

He remembers one healthcare team that implemented a new analytics tool expecting immediate improvements.

"The tool wasn't the problem. The workflow feeding the data was broken. Once we actually fixed that, the technology became really useful. But not before."

His view on technology is practical. It should support good systems, not replace the work of building them.

"Technology should make healthcare simpler. Not louder."

Discipline Beyond Work

Outside of healthcare, Steve applies many of the same principles to his personal life. He trains daily as a HYROX competitor and completed his first competition in 2025.

"Training reminds you that progress is repetitive. You don't get results from motivation. You get them from consistency. Show up, do the work, do it again tomorrow. That's it. Same thing applies to building a business or fixing a healthcare operation."

He has also become increasingly interested in the Food Is Medicine movement and the role nutrition plays in long-term health outcomes.

"We spend a lot of time treating symptoms. We spend a lot less time on the root causes — what we're putting in our bodies, how we're moving them, how we're resting them, and how we're treating our minds. The longer I'm in healthcare, the more I think that's where the real opportunity is."

Still, Steve is quick to point out that his biggest priority is family.

"At the end of the day, being a good husband and father matters more than any title or career milestone. That's the part that actually matters."

A Career Built Around Making Things Work

Steve Valdiserri's career has never been about flashy headlines or oversized promises. It has been about solving operational problems that most people never notice until the systems fail.

His work sits in the middle of healthcare's biggest challenge — turning ideas into execution. And in an industry full of complexity, his practical mindset continues to stand out.