To deliver greater value in healthcare, providers and suppliers must first be able to identify those factors that impact cost, quality and outcomes—as the adage goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Historically, the clinical and operational sides of healthcare have worked in silos, making collaboration and data sharing a challenge. But as payments for care delivery are increasingly tied to quality and efficiency, the industry has begun the hard work of tearing down long-standing barriers.

At GHX, we know the business of healthcare continues to evolve, driving critical changes in how data is used to advance clinical, financial and operational performance. Data show continued strong interest in making the move to value-based care, defined by the outcomes that matter to patients relative to the cost of delivering those outcomes. At the same time, many organizations say the transition to a system that rewards value, not the volume of services delivered, is moving too slowly, hampered by the silos that hold us back from collaborating effectively to deliver optimum patient care. 

In support of the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management’s (AHRMM) annual National Healthcare Supply Chain Week, GHX polled its Best 50 providers regarding their healthcare supply chain priorities for 2020. Survey results underscore the growing role of data derived from the supply chain as a key contributor in solving the cost, quality and outcomes equation in healthcare, as well as understanding and improving overall financial performance.

Over the past 30 years, hospitals have been adopting technologies to steadily increase process automation throughout their operations in an effort to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. It began in the 1980s with the initial use of mainframes and desktop computers for electronic patient registration, continued through the late 1990s with “Best of Breed” systems, such as materials management information systems (MMIS) for order processing and inventory management, and then transitioned in the early 2000s to present day with the adoption of on-premise (“on-prem”) enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that automated both materials management and financial operations.

By now, most of the U.S. has sent their children back to school. The tradition of returning to school is an exciting time for many students but not for all. It can be uncomfortable or intimidating to show up without the same supplies, or any supplies, as their other classmates.

In order to take advantage of geographic synergies or fill gaps in capabilities, healthcare providers are building strategic portfolios through mergers and acquisitions. As new locations and facilities are added to their health system, along with legacy processes and technologies, there is no shortage of change management planning needed. For vendor credentialing, where each location may have unique facility access requirements and visibility into vendor compliance is critical, technology that scales smoothly right along with growth of your health system takes on critical importance.