As a free service for all hospitals connected directly to GHX, GHX Content Intelligence is already being used by more than 250 provider organizations on a daily basis to cleanse purchase orders sent via GHX to participating suppliers. Those suppliers include Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems Inc., Tyco International Ltd., Baxter International Inc., 3M, Medtronic Inc., Guidant Corporation, and Amersham Health, with more suppliers planning to use the product in the near future.

“The lack of synchronization between supplier and provider product information is the source of some of the most costly problems in the healthcare supply chain,” says GHX Vice President of Operations Kevin Ruffe. “Our own experience in comparing supplier and buyer data has found, on average, a 35 percent rate of inconsistency. Further both industry studies and GHX supplier members have found that 70 percent of errors in EDI transactions can be attributed to inconsistencies between the product data held by buyers and sellers. Working in concert with our AllSource™ catalog, GHX Content Intelligence will go a long way to prevent these kinds of problems.”

In addition to using a set of pre-established rules to make corrections, GHX Content Intelligence validates the product data in purchase orders using the most up-to-date information from suppliers, available through GHX’s AllSource™ catalog. GHX Content Intelligence can also apply information garnered from previous corrections to modify future purchase orders as necessary, again validating against the AllSource catalog, the only product catalog in healthcare to contain normalized data verified and maintained by the owners of that data, the manufacturers.

GHX Content Intelligence helps prevent similar mistakes from occurring in the future in two ways. First, by keeping a record of previous changes made, GHX Content Intelligence can identify and correct the same inaccuracies on subsequent purchase orders. Further, by notifying hospitals of the changes made, currently via email and in the future through the reporting functionality provided by GHX’s Report Source, hospitals can manually update the information in their item masters and other internal data files that contain information on the items they purchase regularly. A future release of GHX Content Intelligence will give providers the option of having their item masters automatically updated.

GHX Content Intelligence has resulted in a marked reduction in the number of purchase orders requiring manual intervention for Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems Inc., which processes and distributes incoming hospital supply orders for the Johnson & Johnson family of companies. Terri Lange, group director, e-Business, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems Inc., says, “One of our hospital customers previously required manual intervention on nearly every one of its purchase orders. Just three weeks after implementing GHX Content Intelligence with that hospital, the percentage of manual interventions had been cut in half, and was further reduced to just 27 percent in nine weeks. While that's an impressive example, with reductions in manual interventions ranging from 10 to 90 percent, GHX Content Intelligence is designed to demonstrate the validity of GHX’s commitment to data accuracy as key to making e-commerce work.”

From the buyer perspective, Dan McDow, chief operating officer of Iowa Health System Contracting Services, LC, says the immediate benefit is a cleaner item master: “For healthcare systems like Iowa, with multiple facilities each purchasing millions of dollars in products each year, keeping our product data accurate can be an expensive and daunting task. The email notifications about problems discovered and corrections made have enabled us to continually ‘self-cleanse’ our item masters with relatively little expense or effort. In the future, we anticipate further cost savings through reductions in the number of required reconciliations between product data on invoices, shipping notices and invoices.”

GHX Content Intelligence has the added benefit of enabling healthcare providers to begin conducting business with GHX suppliers more quickly and easily. While certainly preferable, a hospital’s item master no longer needs to be 100 percent cleansed and synchronized to the AllSource catalog prior to going live with GHX. Even hospitals with highly accurate item masters benefit from GHX Content Intelligence’s ability to continually update item master data, manually or eventually automatically, as mistakes are identified during order processing.

About Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX) Global Healthcare Exchange, LLC (GHX) provides an open and neutral electronic trading exchange, along with complementary products and services, through which buyers and sellers can collaborate to improve efficiencies in the healthcare supply chain. GHX’s catalog and content services improve the accuracy of purchasing transactions, reducing many of the most common and costly problems in healthcare procurement, while the privately held company’s revenue neutral business model is designed to lower costs for all involved. GHX’s owners, strategic partners and trading exchange participants are representative of the entire healthcare supply chain, including suppliers and distributors; integrated delivery networks (IDNs), hospitals and ancillary healthcare facilities; group purchasing organizations and their proprietary healthcare trading exchanges; and supply chain technology companies. Equity owners of GHX include Johnson & Johnson Health Care; GE Medical Systems; Baxter Healthcare Corp.; Medtronic USA, Inc.; Abbott Exchange, Inc.; Siemens; Becton, Dickinson & Co.; Boston Scientific Corp. Tyco Healthcare Group, LP; Guidant Corp.; C.R. Bard, Inc.; AmerisourceBergen Corp.; Cardinal Health, Inc.; Fisher Scientific International, Inc.; McKesson Corp.; B Braun Medical Inc.; Premier, Inc. and HCA. For more information visit www.ghx.com.