Supporting the clinically integrated supply chain

• Hani Elias, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Lumere, a GHX company

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.

Recognizing the critical link between supplies and their impact on clinical and financial outcomes, health systems have been working to establish and support a clinically integrated supply chain. As defined by the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM):

“Clinical integration in health care supply chain is an interdisciplinary approach to deliver patient care with the highest value (high quality, best outcomes, and minimal waste at the lowest cost of care) that is achieved through assimilation and coordination of clinical and supply chain knowledge, data, and leadership toward care across the continuum that is safe, timely, evidenced-based, efficient, equitable, and patient focused.”

Healthcare providers need meaningful and applicable insights from the marriage of supply chain, financial and clinical data in order to source the supplies that will help deliver the best quality care at the lowest cost (taking into account factors such as complication and readmission rates). Healthcare suppliers also find tremendous value in knowing how their products impact outcomes from both a clinical and financial perspective, in turn using this knowledge to guide ongoing and future product development efforts.

GHX has been pivotal in supporting providers and suppliers in the shift to value-based care. Similarly, my co-founders and I started Lumere in 2012 to become the leading provider of evidence-based outcomes data and physician preference item cost. We are incredibly proud of all we have accomplished as a standalone business over the past eight years, and we look forward to further advancing the clinically integrated supply chain as a part of GHX.

By combining the GHX platform and the most comprehensive source of item and transaction data, with industry-leading clinical evidence data from Lumere, we can offer providers and suppliers the evidence-based insights they need to drive value-based decisions for better patient care. Benefits include: 

• A single source of trusted information for management of drugs and devices in the delivery of care 
• The ability to align purchasing data and utilization decisions with evidence
• Greater visibility into the cost and clinical outcomes associated with physician preference items 

As collaboration and data sharing accelerates–both across functions within a hospital and across the industry—GHX and Lumere will become the gold standard in device and drug intelligence, providing valuable insights that empower supply chain professionals, clinicians and hospital administrators to harness the power of a clinically integrated supply chain.

Hani Elias

Senior Vice President and General Manager, Lumere, a GHX company