GHX and Workday Align in the Cloud for Healthcare

• Pete Nelson, General Manager, Global Alliances

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.

Going Beyond Supply Chain Basics: Pricing Alignment in Healthcare

• Susan LaFountain, Product Manager, Industry Adoption

Two decades ago, a few healthcare supply chain partners decided to automate basic transactions so that they could improve efficiency and accuracy and reduce costs – and the GHX Exchange was born. Today over 10 thousand supplier divisions and 19 thousand provider facilities use GHX standards to automate the four core supply chain documents: The purchase order (850), purchase order acknowledgment (855), advance ship notice (856) and invoice (810). These “basic” supply chain transactions encompass the processes around placing an order, delivering the products and billing for those products.

Contract Price Alignment and Reducing Exceptions: How are you solving for contract alignment and price exceptions in the topsy-turvy world of healthcare M&A?

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.  

How Will You Manage Your Contracts and Compliance?

Managing contracts and compliance data is a challenge for healthcare organizations today. The process often involves people and departments across the organization requiring a secure but nimble system for tracking negotiations and approvals. Current regulations require healthcare providers to know more about who they are doing business with and to manage their vendor population with consistent scrutiny to maintain accurate data. Adding to the complexity, with mergers becoming more common, hospitals are seeing an increase in the number of local contracts along with contracts that fall outside of med-surg that need to be maintained as well. As a result, organizations need to interact with contracts in new ways, with more flexibility while maintaining even more data and security.

4 Key Elements to a Successful Contract Management Strategy

Healthcare providers need visibility into vendor contracts across the entire organization in order to drive contract compliance, consolidate vendor spend and reduce supply costs. At the heart of improving transparency and visibility is an effective contract management strategy. Without it, organizations lack the ability to obtain and access the data necessary to make smart purchasing decisions and maximize cost savings opportunities.

The Price Alignment Equation

Healthcare contracting is a highly complex, multi-step process and cutting costs in contracting is directly attributed to pricing alignment. The lack of pricing synchronization across supply chain constituents creates pricing errors that result in significant rework between providers and suppliers. In addition, suppliers and distributors require numerous back office personnel to support the highly complex rebate and chargeback process necessary to support group purchasing contracts.

Best Practices in Price Management Yields Significant Savings

By Ronda Wirth, Procurement Operations Manager, Supply Chain Management, Northern Arizona Healthcare

At Northern Arizona Healthcare (NAH), we believe paying any price for a product other than what has been negotiated with the supplier is a disservice to our customers. But doing so is easier said than done.