Future of Healthcare Supply Chains: An In-Depth Analysis

• Kara L. Nadeau, Healthcare Industry Contributor

As healthcare systems seek to build resilience, industry leaders are looking to technology as the primary source of innovation. This in-depth analysis of current challenges and future trends explores the role of AI, value-based care, DEI and sustainability in the future of healthcare supply chains. 

GHX named a Healthcare Industry Notable Vendor in 2022 Gartner® Vertical Industry Context

We’re excited to share that GHX was named a Notable Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Vertical Industry Context: ‘Magic Quadrant™ for Multienterprise Supply Chain Business Networks’. We believe this is meaningful in showing how we help our customers achieve strategic digital transformations and unlock value through collaboration by engaging internally and with trading partners. The expansion of digitization industry-wide helps to modernize and build resiliency in the healthcare supply chain.

How Data Supports Consignment Implant Order Automation

“Not to beat a dead horse but I’m going to say it again. It starts with your data. You’ve got to clean your house up—make sure everything is clean, contracts aligned, pricing loaded—and then you can build from there. If that's not right, it gets messy, a lot of back and forth, and nobody is going to be satisfied.” -Franco Sagliocca, Corporate Director, Supply Chain, Mount Sinai Health System.

 After years of trying, health systems are successfully automating implant orders thanks to technology advancements, greater provider/supplier collaboration and the desire to find new ways to drive costs and waste out of the healthcare supply chain.

Why now is the time to automate your implant orders

“I would say that we were the driver in helping our teams understand what was possible. That would be one thing we had to continuously do and would say to all of you as well. This is possible. It can be done.”  Jack Koczela, Froedtert Health, Director of Supply Chain Services

Health systems and their suppliers have long looked for ways to simplify implant orders to reduce costs, save time, improve contract and invoice accuracy, and provide better patient care by making sure the right implants are available.

During the 2022 GHX Summit Automating Bill-Only Implant Orders panel presentation, supply chain leaders from three U.S. health systems, Froedtert Health, Mount Sinai Health System and Stanford Health Care, explained to attendees why the time to automate implant orders is now and shared their stories on how they did it.

Embracing a Digital Transformation Strategy: Leading Healthcare Suppliers Make Doing Business Easier

Most would agree that being easy to do business with is a way to set your business apart and deepen customer relationships. It is certainly so for suppliers in the competitive healthcare industry. Leading suppliers are looking at the complete customer experience and acting on the opportunity to support healthcare providers’ needs by embracing a digital transformation strategy.

Leveraging Data for Analytics and Insights: Leading Healthcare Suppliers Know the Shared Value

Leading healthcare suppliers are embracing the needs of their healthcare provider customers for more automation from end to end in supply chain. A well-planned digital transformation strategy helps to contain costs, support supply chain resiliency, and distinguish leading suppliers from the rest of the pack.

From the first step of digitization comes an abundance of data. But for all stakeholders to reap the value from the output, we need a way to understand and put the data to use in a way that drives better patient outcomes. Predictive analytics can help suppliers and customers support critical business decisions impacting patient care.

How Will Suppliers Respond to Increasingly Complex Healthcare Supply Chains?

There is more complexity coming to healthcare supply chain. This will require support for value-based care and preparing for the continued rise in healthcare delivery outside of a traditional hospital setting. Precision, accuracy and timing for supply delivery will continue to grow in importance. Establishing a foundation that will support your customers’ needs today and for quickly emerging trends is the critical third step in making it easier for healthcare providers to conduct business with you.

Modernizing the supply chain to create a future where affordable, quality healthcare is possible

• Tina Vatanka Murphy, President & CEO

As health systems continue the shift toward value-based care and seek to overcome the challenges wrought by COVID-19, they face significant pressures due to workforce shortages, reimbursement challenges, mounting supply costs and persistent sourcing difficulties. In their return to this post-pandemic reality, leaders are pursuing opportunities to transform their businesses to be more operationally efficient and cost-effective while maximizing revenue opportunities and improving patient care.

Trends for 2022 and Beyond for Medical Device Company-to-Hospital Supply Chains

• Denise Odenkirk, Vice President, Supplier Sales

Following nearly two years of disruption from a global pandemic, natural disasters, and even an unprecedented shipping canal blockage, trends that emerged out of necessity are now more likely the expected way of doing business.

In this post, Denise Odenkirk, Vice President of Supplier Sales for GHX lends her perspective on the driving forces behind the trends and the value to the industry.

*Republished in part with permission from BONEZONE, www.BONEZONEpub.com.

A Cloud ERP System + The Right Data = Organizational Resiliency

• Pete Nelson, General Manager, Global Alliances

As recent months have painfully demonstrated, healthcare systems and processes must be fortified to withstand shock and maintain business continuity in the face of unforeseen challenges. To be sure, cloud ERP systems provide greater resilience for healthcare organizations compared to disparate on-premises systems. But without the right data, that resilience can be limited.

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.

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.

Standardizing and Automating Order Confirmations: The Long-Tail Effect

What role does the purchase order acknowledgment (POA) play in supporting better patient outcomes? This simple task, when accomplished, can be traced back to multiple advantages in the healthcare supply chain. This is especially true when the POA is part of a holistic, standardized approach to order management. The supply chain team gains greater visibility into order status and can better manage the process of delivering the correct products in a timely manner to support patient care.

Healthcare Supply Chain at the Intersection of Cost, Quality and Outcomes

In 2013, around the same time that value-based purchasing and alternate payment models hit the healthcare scene, the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM) launched its Cost, Quality and Outcomes (CQO) Movement, which frames the new role that supply chain professionals play in today’s value-based healthcare environment.

Integrating Disparate Systems in Healthcare

• Steve Cochran, Chief Technology Officer

As healthcare pushes to become a data-driven industry, we must ensure that we can connect the data from every system to make continued improvements in cost reduction, performance, efficiency and above all else, patient care. After years of automation, healthcare faces a familiar dilemma: disparate systems with similar, yet different data. Back-end and clinical systems are unable to “talk” to each other, and when they do, they aren’t speaking the same language because the data doesn’t necessarily match.

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.

5 Ways Healthcare Leaders are Shifting in a Transformative Time

Changes in healthcare – from delivery to payment – are impacting leadership and the structure of healthcare organizations. These changes are driving the need for talent previously not seen as key components for successful healthcare organizations. As a result, leaders are beginning to include members with expertise outside of traditional roles such as social media, customer experience, marketing and change management. This shift in thinking is key to an industry experiencing a major transformation and we are seeing it play out in five key ways.

Hospital M&A -- Top Three To-Do's

Healthcare mergers and acquisitions caught fire in 2015 and are predicted to continue the trend. As noted in the recent article Hospital M&A is Heating Up co-authored by myself and Mike Gillespie, global management consulting firm Accenture forecasts acquisitions of non-acute providers to reach 84 percent of total acquisition volume by 2018. The M&A activity is fueled by efforts to cut cost, increase quality and gain economies of scale needed to survive in a value-based reimbursement environment. However, these goals may be compromised when provider organizations aren’t preparing adequately for the integration of technology systems and data that will impact clinical, business and financial performance.

2016 Conferences Highlight Trends in Healthcare

GHX participates in and attends many healthcare industry conferences each year in addition to hosting the annual Healthcare Supply Chain Summit. In the course of attending these conferences, we typically see common themes that run from event to event. It would come as no surprise that the current environment finds healthcare providers continuing to look for opportunities where costs can be reduced and programs can be operationalized while still contributing to the quality of patient care. 

Healthcare M&A Presents Opportunities for Change

Since 2013, Mount Sinai Health System has grown rapidly through M&A activity. As a result, we’ve had multiple hospitals with their own supply chain and accounts payable (AP) departments each using disparate technologies, including different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and item masters. 

Tips For Establishing Trust With Your Trading Partners

Healthcare suppliers and providers that have collaborated on supply chain improvement initiatives have reaped the rewards of greater efficiency and lower costs – but it requires a level of trust nonexistent in many trading partner relationships.

 “In the traditional buy/sell relationship, each party is trying to outwit the other,” said Gene Kirtser, President and CEO of Resource Optimization & Innovation (ROi), Mercy Health’s supply chain division. “But we are at a point in our industry where that is simply not sustainable. Providers and suppliers must learn to work together to find ways to reduce costs. That’s the only way we will all survive.”

Cost-to-Serve: Four Steps to Get Started

Most providers and suppliers recognize that Cost-to-Serve in healthcare is high but the day-to-day challenges in supply chain seem so overwhelming, they don’t know how to begin to address them. Here are four key steps from healthcare supply chain leaders to get you started.

Three Ways to Reduce Cost-to-Serve in Healthcare Today

While most providers and suppliers spend countless hours hashing out issues around product price, few have examined an area that presents a greater area of savings for both parties – the actual total delivered cost of a product. This includes direct and indirect costs required on both sides of the supply chain to deliver the right product to the right place at the right time.

Has your customer service team fallen behind the times?

In a healthcare environment where everything has become digital, most medical-surgical product manufacturers have transitioned from manual data entry to electronic, automated processes for customer orders.

Are your customer service reps still physically keying in orders while your competitors and peers have put into place touch-less order processes? Do your customers consider your competitors and peers easier to do business with because their orders flow electronically via EDI? If so, consider this:

5 Tips to Enact Change Through Supply Chain Collaboration

Within many healthcare organizations, the supply chain department operates in a silo disengaged from frontline caregivers. In the case of McLeod Health, this led to $3.2 million a year in lost revenue as a result of not capturing product usage at the point of care. To address this issue, McLeod’s senior leadership assembled a multidisciplinary team comprising administration, clinical leaders, finance, information systems and procurement, to analyze supply chain processes, identify points of revenue leakage and put processes and systems in place to address them.

New Awards Reflect the Evolving Healthcare Supply Chain

• Karen Conway, Vice President, Healthcare Value

Next week, nominations open for the 2016 GHXcellence Awards. The expanded array of awards reflect the evolving nature of supply chain and the role it plays in improving both costs and quality in healthcare. GHX still honors the Best 50 hospitals and healthcare systems for the work they are doing to automate processes and reduce costly exceptions. The value of automation and accuracy remains foundational and should never be taken for granted. After all, that alone led to GHX and its customers documenting more than $5 billion in savings in less than five years. Today, we continue to document savings, but now we are able to also take into account the addition of more mature supply chain practices, including those recognized in the expanded awards program.

2016: The Acceleration of Healthcare Supply Chain Maturity

• Bruce Johnson, Executive Chairman

For the last few years, the team at GHX has made yearly predictions for the healthcare supply chain – often anticipating major trends, challenges and opportunities for the industry. And, most times, I’m proud to say we’ve been fairly accurate with those predictions! In 2016, we’re continuing that tradition with the release of our top five trends for the year

The Year the Healthcare Supply Chain Solidified its Strategic Role

• Bruce Johnson, Executive Chairman

At GHX, like many of you, we’ve been engaged in weeks of strategic planning for 2016. The opportunities in front of us and for our customers are significant. But before I get to how I see 2016 evolving for the healthcare supply chain industry, I want to reflect on the past 12 months and the major themes, events and changes that moved the healthcare industry in 2015.

Canada: Six Key Performance Areas for 2016

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

The 2015 Canadian Industry Stakeholder Meeting (October, 2015 in Mississauga, ON) brought together over 150 participants from supplier, provider, GPO and distributor organizations to share experiences and learn from one another.

Meeting topics focused on contract management, price alignment and performance measurement. Throughout the day, presenters from both provider and supplier organizations shared the tools and processes they use to effectively track these core business functions. Following the presentations, participants broke into smaller groups for further discussion.

The Top Five Ways the Healthcare Supply Chain is Improving Patient Care Today (Pt. 1)

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

As I noted in my Monday blog post, this week is AHRMM’s National Healthcare Supply Chain Week. To honor this annual event, my team at GHX compiled the five biggest ways that healthcare organizations are leveraging their supply chains to improve patient outcomes on a daily basis. We are not exaggerating when we describe these projects as “revolutionary” for the healthcare industry. Rather than “talking the talk,” these organizations are “walking the walk” to create a more efficient and cost-effective healthcare system. Today I’m going to share the first three ways we see our customers doing just that:

The Emergence of Just-in-Time Buying

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

If you’re a reader of healthcare trades, you’ve likely seen the emergence of the acronym: JIT. This stands for “just-in-time” and it refers to just-in-time purchasing (as well as JIT buying or JIT inventory management) of products to keep supplies lean and costs low. As hospitals are challenged to reduce costs while dealing with major cuts in reimbursements, many of them are exploring JIT with keen interest. 

Looking into the Crystal Ball: The Future Healthcare Supply Chain

• Bruce Johnson, Executive Chairman

During the past two months, the team at GHX conducted numerous interviews with some of our most forward-thinking provider and supplier customers. The topic of these interviews was the “Supply Chain of the Future.” We weren’t talking “future” in the sense of a year or two out, but rather 10-to-20 years in the future – when the healthcare industry will look very different than it does today.

Can You Take the Words: "Not Now, We’re Too Busy" Out of Your Team’s Vocabulary?

• Denise Odenkirk, Vice President, Supplier Sales

In my role at GHX, I spend a great deal of time thinking about our customers and prospects, and how to help them get the most out of the solutions GHX provides.

Wherever I go, everyone I meet seems to have the same goal: they intend to move their organization to be “best in class.” They are excited about the solutions GHX is bringing to the industry and understand the benefits they will realize. However, they are often too busy to engage resources on projects. So what I hear them saying is moving to ”best in class” must wait.