New Survey: GHX Best 50 Providers Look to Predictive Analytics, Better Use of Data for Informed Decision Making in 2017

• Scott Kelley, Vice President of North American Sales and Marketing

The GHX Best 50 is comprised of North American provider organizations that score highest in automation of transactions with their trading partners, Exchange utilization and trading partner connections during a calendar year. We recently surveyed this group of high performers to gauge their perceptions of their healthcare supply chain priorities and outcomes for 2017.

We asked these Best 50 leaders in what areas supply chain would be critical to the future of healthcare. Predictive analytics was the leading answer, followed by optimizing value-based reimbursement and integration following mergers and acquisitions. Other key findings included:

Increased emphasis on quality data as the foundation for all analytics activities. The supply chain is a valuable source of data on healthcare supply chain spend that’s necessary for evaluation of outcomes and for decision making for savings initiatives. Supply chain leaders anticipate the use of this information becoming an important contributor to value (cost and quality) measurement as an important metric for assessing over all financial performance.

As the strategic importance of the supply chain grows, so does the role of the supply chain executive. According to the survey, supply chain leaders will increasingly work hand in hand with clinical peers to help lower costs and improve patient care. In addition, the supply chain team plays a more strategic role in provider organizations, tackling a variety of critical healthcare issues (e.g., value based care, improving clinical performance, reducing risk, EHRs, etc.).

Top performing supply chain organizations will look to improve price accuracy between supplier and provider partners as well as standardize business processes and data across the organization. The following areas were identified as among the critical healthcare supply chain initiatives planned for 2017:
• Standardization: for physician preference items (PPI) and across all clinical areas; reduction in manual processes and paper transactions; process excellence for operational management; of value analysis process to increase clinical value-add for patient outcomes;
• Contract Management: implementation of contract management system; improve contract compliance; higher contract penetration;
• Data Management and Analysis: better analysis of supply chain costs; master data management; leverage data and analytics; data accuracy;
• Optimization and Cost Reduction: ERP functionality; supply cost reduction; elimination of product proliferation and reduce warehouse items; reduction of special order.

These survey results underscore that the healthcare supply chain continues to be at a pivotal juncture, taking increased advantage of advanced technology to deliver affordable value-based care by accelerating efficiencies and improving access to quality data for decision-making. Automation creates the opportunity to gather greater insights into products used in patient care, which is necessary to satisfy the growing need for predictive analytics. The linkage between data on products used in patient care as recorded in electronic health records with accurate and comprehensive information about those products in item masters is key to solving the cost/quality equation.

We’ll look forward to watching how these forward-looking healthcare supply chain priorities will reap benefits for organizations in 2017. To read the full survey press release, click here.

Scott Kelley

Vice President of North American Sales and Marketing