Reaching $3 Billion in Healthcare Savings – and Counting

I want to take a little time to toot our own horn here, as GHX customers this week achieved a major milestone in our “5-in-5” goal.  As of March 31st, we hit the $3 billion mark in healthcare supply chain savings. This is huge, having surpassed the halfway mark in our goal to take $5 billion out of the cost of healthcare in five years. Just typing “$3 billion” doesn’t convey just how much money has been saved. So I did a bit of research to try and find another way to represent it.

This is $1 billion dollars. Now multiply this by three. $3 billion dollars (in $100 bills) would need 30 forklifts to be moved. It’s a lot of money. OK, I think I got my point across!

At GHX our mission is to drive costs out of healthcare by running supply chain processes more efficiently and collaboratively. Reducing healthcare costs helps providers deliver cost-effective, high-quality patient care. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that all that really matters?

Working at GHX, I can attest to the fact that we live, eat and breathe healthcare supply chain. As the second largest and fastest growing expense for healthcare organizations, it is both a challenge and major opportunity to drive savings. And that is why a large focus of our upcoming Healthcare Supply Chain Summit is devoted to the topic of driving costs out of healthcare with help of the supply chain.

In a keynote that I am particularly excited about, Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Medical Center, will discuss how it reversed a $60 million annual loss and, within five years, produced a $70 million annual gain by optimizing its supply chain (among other initiatives). Some of other sessions include:

• Cost-to-Serve: Making it Real for Your Organization: McLeod Health, Symmetry Surgical and Zimmer will discuss the Cost-to-Serve (CTS) approach to help manage supply chain processes more collaboratively and efficiently, while ensuring each process contributes value to the business.
• Supply Chain Levers for Reducing Costs: Medical University Hospital Authority will share how it raised the profile of its supply chain to that of a strategic business initiative to reduce operational costs and support clinical and revenue-integration initiatives.
• How Do You Take the Lead? Best Practices for Providers: Hackensack University Medical Center will explain how it moved from a ranking of 441 among GHX provider accounts to the top 10 by accelerating supply chain performance and reducing operating costs.
• How Do You Take the Lead? Best Practices for Suppliers: W.L. Gore will walk through how it saved resource time and reduced costs by leveraging the supply chain to achieve the “touchless order.”  

You can view the entire Healthcare Supply Chain Summit agenda here. And be sure to visit our “5-in-5” ticker regularly to check in on the savings … we’ll be sure to keep you posted along the way!