The Healthcare Hub

There’s been a surge of merger and acquisition (M&A) activity within the healthcare industry. During the first quarter of 2018, there were M&A deals totaling nearly $156B, the strongest start in over a decade.¹, ² While healthcare companies view mergers and acquisitions as strategic growth initiatives, how do they impact their customers – healthcare organizations – and their patients?

If you are in anyway involved in the healthcare contracting process, you know the tremendous challenge that providers, manufacturers and distributors face when attempting to manually align data for pricing accuracy. With thousands of price changes happening each day, all parties to a contract spend an enormous amount of time and money trying to keep up with them.

With the healthcare industry experiencing such a large volume of mergers and acquisitions, many hospitals and health systems are dealing with disparate technologies and its impact on efficiency, data management and cost containment. These obstacles can create an even greater burden on supply chain with misaligned contract pricing and increased supply chain exceptions.  

The advantages to cloud computing are many, backed by expansive computing power and improved security and efficiency at a lower cost. In line with the trend across most every industry, healthcare has traction and is gaining momentum in the shift to a cloud computing model for these very same advantages. However, preparing your organization to move your Materials Management Information System (MMIS) / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to a new cloud technology platform is no easy task, and a change of this magnitude necessitates new thinking. Replacing the MMIS/ERP with cloud-based services impacts many critical facets of your organization including finance, human resources, and supply chain.

How mobile technology investments can fast-track your goals for improved interactions with your customers

Delivering a delightful customer experience starts with understanding the customer’s journey. For most healthcare manufacturers and distributors, there are many touch-points available to engage with customers, with mobile being the area of greatest potential. Just in this year, 52% of all worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones — that is up from 50% in the previous year.

While we work hard to avoid mistakes, they also are an opportunity for learning and growth. It may be painful in the moment but over the long run the not-so-perfect can be a catalyst for positive change. This was the case for a leading medical manufacturer when they began to truly understand the importance of credentialing their reps to their customers.