Supply Chain Optimization

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.

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.

In support of the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management’s (AHRMM) annual National Healthcare Supply Chain Week, GHX polled its Best 50 providers regarding their healthcare supply chain priorities for 2020. Survey results underscore the growing role of data derived from the supply chain as a key contributor in solving the cost, quality and outcomes equation in healthcare, as well as understanding and improving overall financial performance.

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.

The benefits of electronic trading are well established, but for many healthcare manufacturers and distributors electronic data interchange (EDI) has competed with other priorities as the overhead and resources needed to implement and maintain systems can be significant. However, the growth that both manufacturers and healthcare organizations are now experiencing has intensified the importance and urgency to reduce manual processes and ramp efficiency and accuracy with automation.

With the shift to value-based healthcare fully underway, we are not seeing a slow-down in mergers and acquisitions. This has become a favored way to build on financial, clinical and operational synergies, extend care to a broader geographic area and mitigate declining reimbursements. According to the Q2 report from KaufmanHall¹, the first half of 2019 is tracking in line with 2018 transaction activity for the same time period.

Rural hospitals are often the centers of their communities. In addition to caring for the residents, they are also typically one of the largest employers in the area. The presence of a hospital can be an incentive to bring in new business spurring job growth and providing an economic boost. The impact of losing a rural hospital to closure goes beyond access to medical care for the local residents but can impact the community in a far more significant way. Over the last nine years, we see the loss of rural hospitals in higher numbers for a multitude of reasons. Because of the far-reaching effects of these losses, efforts are being launched to reimagine and revitalize hospitals in rural areas to meet the needs of their local communities.

What happens when things don’t go as expected? What happens if the schedule changes, a staff member calls in sick, or you are assigned a special project that must be done now and you already have a full plate? The best-laid plans have fallen apart on any number of things in our lives, for each and every one of us. Planning for the unexpected is what gets you through successfully. 

The healthcare industry increasingly is recognizing the critical value of collaboration across hospitals and health systems and their supplier organizations to achieve cost savings, strengthen business processes and most importantly, improve the quality of patient care. This year’s GHXcellence award winners represent some of the most innovative leaders and organizations in the industry. They are facing many new challenges as an opportunity to shape the future business of healthcare.

The cloud presents an enormous opportunity for procurement in healthcare to expedite transactions with efficiency and agility. A cloud-based platform eliminates many obstacles enabling a smoother process for transactions and shipments. Imagine the benefits, for example, of speeding the replenishment process, or eventually, a world in which replenishments refill automatically.

The healthcare industry is undergoing significant change. In response, supply chain has the potential to make forward progress in both new and old problems, but success in the new environment calls for a different approach. Where a traditional approach may feel more comfortable, the industry must embrace innovative thinking to tackle the challenges in this new era.

In my previous blog post, I described how the healthcare industry has yet to tackle standardization and automation of so-called “advanced” supply chain transaction sets. These are processes around contract pricing alignment and reconciliation that go beyond the basics of placing an order, delivering the products and billing for those products. The manual management of price changes in healthcare is complex, challenging and costly, placing a significant burden on all parties to a contract (e.g. manufacturer, distributor, provider, GPO).

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.

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.

In my last post, Integrating Academic and Non-Acute Supply Chain, I drilled down into some of the challenges for this initiative around data, buying behavior and aligning cross-functionally for success. This is an ambitious endeavor, aligning the people, processes and systems, but certainly will deliver significant benefits. When you are ready to take the next steps there are several key considerations for gathering requirements and choosing a technology partner.  

Expanding on the thoughts from my earlier post, Healthcare Supply Chain in 2019: A Look Forward, I want to take a deeper dive into the three areas that were top of mind, starting with the integration of non-acute and academic supply chain.

As more and more organizations in both the academic and acute care sectors are realizing the broad value that supply chain can deliver, there is a movement to integrate (consolidate and standardize) the core mechanisms of sourcing, procurement, supplier and contract lifecycle. The procurement of goods and services through an efficient and effective supply chain will become increasingly vital to ensure that higher-education institutions have governance related to the effective appropriation of funds.

Healthcare data breaches reached an all-time high this past July. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights records showed that data from 858,411 individuals were put at risk. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily surprising news, but it does serve as a reminder that a single breach can expose thousands of patient records and put individual personal information at risk for fraudulent activity. It also can be a costly event for healthcare providers from a financial and reputational perspective.

Supply chain remains the second largest expense for healthcare providers. A recent Navigant study showed U.S. hospitals could reduce annual supply expenses by roughly $23B in aggregate through improvements in supply chain operations, processes and product use – effective management of spend, inventory and operational processes are key to optimize spend management for any health system.

Blockchain is an emerging technology that has received quite a bit of attention for the potential to disrupt in a variety of industries. Healthcare stands to benefit from the technology as blockchains are designed for large volumes of data. The industry is characterized by massive amounts of data, much of it siloed and difficult to access through disparate technology.

The value that could be gained from the data for process improvement to increase efficiency and reduce costs has been held back by the lack of interoperability and accessibility. But blockchain may open the gate. The application of blockchain technology for the healthcare industry holds promise for everything from clinical and insurance records to payer files and supply chain.

Standardization is critical to the successful transition to value-based healthcare. Karen Conway, vice president, Healthcare Value for GHX recently reported on the value of GS1 standards for clinicians following the 34^th Global Healthcare Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. New to the conference this year were sessions on the role of standards in improving value-based healthcare. Susan Moffat-Bruce, MD, a thoracic surgeon and executive director of The Ohio State University (OSU) Wexner Medical Center explained that doctors want to improve patient outcomes, but many are not aware of GS1 standards and the value they can provide.

Collaboration between supply chain and other functional areas of healthcare will be critical in driving the next level of innovation in healthcare. It's no wonder that supply chain teams are called upon to facilitate the collaboration necessary to tackle cost, quality, and outcomes given the immense value found in supply chain data and expertise. The importance of both the data and expertise will continue to grow in a value-based healthcare environment.

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.

The outlook for the 2019 healthcare supply chain is an ebb and flow of constantly responding to changing direction and approach to process improvement, new technologies and changing industry trends. The landscape is becoming more and more complex for our leaders to navigate, and keep pace, while continuing to demonstrate financial improvements across the organization.

Healthcare organizations today are taking a step back to evaluate the approach to patient care environments while improving standards for Cost, Quality, and Outcomes (CQO). We are beginning to see many new partnerships in the provider space for innovative strategies to address rising supply costs, clinical demands and financial responsibility.

There’s been a surge of merger and acquisition (M&A) activity within the healthcare industry. During the first quarter of 2018, there were M&A deals totaling nearly $156B, the strongest start in over a decade.¹, ² While healthcare companies view mergers and acquisitions as strategic growth initiatives, how do they impact their customers – healthcare organizations – and their patients?

The advantages to cloud computing are many, backed by expansive computing power and improved security and efficiency at a lower cost. In line with the trend across most every industry, healthcare has traction and is gaining momentum in the shift to a cloud computing model for these very same advantages. However, preparing your organization to move your Materials Management Information System (MMIS) / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to a new cloud technology platform is no easy task, and a change of this magnitude necessitates new thinking. Replacing the MMIS/ERP with cloud-based services impacts many critical facets of your organization including finance, human resources, and supply chain.

The quality of supply chain data is critical to so many operations within a health system. It really is the foundation for success. At our most recent Supply Chain Summit, representatives from TransForm Shared Service Organization presented their data story on the Summit20 stage.

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 much did that procedure cost?” Simple question that is simply too difficult for providers to answer. Supply chain plays perhaps the most critical role in helping the industry get to a clear and reliable answer.

Blockchain is a digital decentralized public database that can be shared among its users. It creates an unalterable digitally signed record of each transaction, called a block. For every new transaction, a new block is created which links with the preceding block, thereby resulting in a chain of blocks; this is how blockchain derives its name. Since the blocks cannot be altered or deleted, it is an accurate repository of every transaction made in a blockchain.

The adoption of technological advancements, in healthcare or any industry for that matter, varies for a number of reasons and happens along a predictable continuum. When a new technology emerges, there will be people who adopt at the earliest stages (innovators), early adopters, those in the early majority, those in the late majority, and laggards who resist the adoption altogether. The reasons for these different rates of adoption are varied as well. Some see cost as a prohibitive factor. Some do not trust new technologies and want to make sure that they have been fully vetted before bringing them into their own practice. Others are simply comfortable with their current way of doing things and don't seek out a change. 

The strategic value of supply chain in tackling costs, eliminating waste and driving efficiency has never been more important — or in the spotlight. GHX honors the Best 50 U.S. healthcare organizations for improving operational performance and driving down costs through supply chain automation each year at the GHX Supply Chain Summit. The competition to win gets a little more challenging each year as winners achieve new levels of efficiency, making the accomplishment more noteworthy with each passing year.

One of the key questions I hear consistently is: how can I design a supply chain for my organization that is truly effective and strategic for my organization? What are the important things I should be prioritizing?

The supply chain sits at the center of the healthcare industry’s ongoing transformation. A recent study by Navigant found that U.S. hospitals could reduce annual supply expenses by approximately $23 billion in aggregate through improvements in supply chain operations, processes and product use. To create the agile, resilient supply chain the industry demands, we’ll need a lot of computing power, something that previously was cost prohibitive for most industry stakeholders. 

The healthcare industry is constantly challenged to do more with less, while still providing an outstanding level of patient care. Technology advances have been a reliable driver of healthcare efficiencies that help lower costs and streamline processes. These advances extend beyond clinical functions to include healthcare IT itself. Hospitals and their vendor partners who embrace cloud technology will realize significant efficiencies that lead to better resource planning and improved business transactions.

Part three in a series on the AHRMM Cost-Quality-Outcomes Summit

Over the past decade, recognition of the strategic role of supply chain has grown significantly; no longer is it just about the price paid for products and the efficiency of procurement. Supply chain can play a pivotal role in how hospitals and healthcare systems are improving the total cost of care, the quality of that care and the patient experience, and, in turn, financial outcomes in the form of better reimbursement under value-based payment programs. This is at the heart of the AHRMM Cost-Quality-Outcomes (CQO) Movement. I was proud to serve on the board and chair the marketing committee when we first launched the CQO Movement in 2013; since then, it has been heartening to watch how the movement has been adopted by organizations representing a wide range of participants in the healthcare system.

The second in a three-part series on the 2017 AHRMM Cost-Quality-Outcomes (CQO) Summit

As a nurse by training, Anne Snowdon, BScN, MSc, PhD., is appalled by the fact that preventable medical errors are a leading cause of death in both the U.S. and Canada.[i]^,[ii]  As a researcher, she believes the supply chain holds the key to help reduce the numbers of patients who are harmed, not healed, in the hospitals of the two neighboring nations. 

The term “population health” is one of those words we hear a lot in healthcare, but there is rarely a common understanding of what it means. While I am certainly not the definitive expert, most would agree it has to do with improving the health of a target population, which can be as broad as all members of an Accountable Care Organization (ACO), but it more accurately refers to patients with similar comorbidities and other factors impacting their health and well being, such as the social determinants of health. Those are factors such as:  where someone lives, level of education, income, and race/ethnicity. These factors have been found to have more of an impact on whether someone is in good health or not and their expected lifespan than the clinical care they receive. 

I’m often approached by CIOs who ask me about GHX transitioning 100 percent to the cloud. Most of us recognize and believe that the cloud is the future of computing, yet overseeing such a huge migration creates enormous personal and professional pressure. 

How can you significantly influence your supply chain performance without the help of additional resources?

Healthcare provider organizations are tasked with this dilemma daily and the goal to go beyond just managing costs, but to actually reduce costs while improving patient outcomes. Supply chain specifically goes after this challenge with an eye toward expanding automation, using data proactively and improving contract price alignment.

The underlying things going on in your supply chain, that you just can’t see without looking at the data, are where opportunities exist to move the needle. Everything may look good on the surface — you're automated from procure to invoice and following up on exceptions, have contracts loaded, etc. — but when you look deeper you get a different picture. This is your tuning point, when you move from “Everything is great” to “Uh-oh not so great — we’ve got problems” to “I don’t know where to even begin.”

How do you get the wheels turning? Where do you direct your focus?  

Creating predictability and eliminating the guesswork from AP and AR processes requires automating payment solutions, according to new study.

“The check is in the mail.”

When it’s time to be paid, few refrains produce more unease than this one. For healthcare suppliers working to improve receivables performance, ambiguity in payment processing is problematic. As competition intensifies and interest rates rise, the pressure on suppliers to create more predictability around payment processes is climbing sharply, according to a recent study by Institutional Investor Custom Research Lab.

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.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have become the norm in our industry. Most health systems and hospitals have been, or will soon be, involved in an M&A as we move into the era of “super IDNs.” At the end of the day, none of us are going to stop this activity from occurring, so what can we do to be successful? 

During a panel discussion at the 2017 Healthcare Supply Chain Summit entitled, “What provider supply chain executives should know about M&As: The Good, Bad and Ugly,” three seasoned experts in healthcare M&As shared their best practices and lessons learned -Nancy LeMaster, VP of Supply Chain Transformation at BJC HealthCare; John Berger Executive Director of Finance Shared Services at Piedmont Healthcare; and Karl Blomback, Corporate VP for Hackensack Meridian Health.

You have probably heard it said, “You had to be there,” meaning that the retelling of the story probably doesn’t do justice to the actual experience. There are many such instances at the GHX Supply Chain Summit where over 800 healthcare supply chain professionals gather each year for insightful and thought provoking presentations and conversations. So, while there are many experiences at the Summit that you have to “be there” for, here are some thoughts, ideas and statements heard at the 2017 Supply Chain Summit that pack a punch even in the retelling.

Healthcare suppliers want to offer choices for payment processing and providers need options, but what is the real cost on both sides?

When it comes to payment options, the more choices the better right? Healthcare suppliers want to get paid fast, and healthcare providers want to take advantage of early pay discounts and rebates, and avoid late fees. So why not have a variety of payment methods in place: check, wire, credit card, Automated Clearing House (ACH), etc.?

But choice can add costs.

Disconnect between finance and supply chain is costly for healthcare suppliers and providers

In healthcare we typically operate in silos, with the right hand blind to what the left hand is doing. Take for instance finance in both provider and supplier organizations. While accounting and accounts payable/collections might communicate regularly with treasury and engage in all-team meetings, their structures, business processes and policies are often disjointed. Without an integrated approach throughout its financial functions, an organization cannot fully assess its activities and identify opportunities for cost savings.

The healthcare industry is undergoing a transformation aimed at providing higher quality, more cost-effective care. Key to striking the balance between cost and quality is data.

At GHX, we know data can help organizations set strategic direction and direct critical business and care decisions. However, this only holds true when “bad data” does not serve as the foundation for efficient and effective value analysis efforts. 

For instance, healthcare providers take advantage of their supply chain data to help reduce cost and improve standardized patient care. That data, coupled with predictive analytics, helps to better anticipate future product demand — which enables providers to avoid losing speed to patient care due to discontinued or backordered products. 

This week Supply & Demand Chain Executive announced the recipients of its annual “Pros to Know” award, which recognizes the industry’s top supply chain professionals. It’s my pleasure to share that not one, but two GHX executives were chosen to receive this year’s recognition: Pete Nelson and Chris Louma. 

It would appear that Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on anything if you are listening to the conversations or sound bites. In the recent HPN article, Amidst political turmoil, value is a bipartisan standard, Karen Conway finds there is something that both parties in Washington do agree on – better quality healthcare at a lower cost, which at a high level is the definition of value.

When you consider legislation passed in recent years, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) and the 21^st Century Cures Act, it is clear that there is bipartisan support for better quality care at a lower cost regardless of the battle over ACA.

You don’t wake up one morning and just say, “I’m going to run a marathon today”. No, you have a plan to get ready. The winners of GHX Best 50 all started somewhere and developed a plan for getting where they wanted to be – on the stage receiving their award!

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.

Healthcare organizations have traditionally worked to limit the product data held in item masters to the products used most commonly. Today, with expanded use of electronic health records, the item master is becoming more of a strategic asset and the single source of truth for item information in multiple systems. This evolution suggests that the item master may become more valuable by extending item data beyond routine stock and products.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.”

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Strategies for cleaning up item masters, maintaining integrity over time through data synchronization and automation. Recently, I have been speaking with hospital supply chain executives about the Accountable Supply Chain Leader. What kinds of skills and leadership traits are needed to lead supply chain in a value-based world and what kinds of skills and traits should you look for in your team? I close the presentation with a quote from 19th Century English mathematician and author Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.

"Why, sometimes I have dreamed six impossible things before breakfast!"

As we come to the end of another National Healthcare Supply Chain Week, I want to share two more ways that GHX customers are using their supply chains to significantly improve patient outcomes. On Wednesday, I delved into the use of outcomes data, the creation of clinical/supply chain teams and the expansion of the supply chain outside the four walls of the hospital. Today’s themes touch on and leverage some of the most highly anticipated and buzzed-about technologies.

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:

Imagine. Later today, Lora Cecere’s Global Summit kicks off in Phoenix. This is the flag ship program for Supply Chain Insights (the analyst firm run by Lora Cecere) and it is absolutely a team effort, with lots of work by those who work for and with Lora. But I purposefully called it Lora Cecere’s Global Summit, because it is Lora’s unending energy and passion around supply chain that makes this event unique among the growing number of supply chain events being held around the globe.

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. 

In May 2014, the UK Department of Health published the NHS eProcurement Strategy. This comes nine months after the Department published Better Procurement, Better Value, Better Care, and which we wrote about here. The lead author, Mr Steve Graham, will be speaking at this year’s GHX Healthcare Supply Chain Summit on the NHS eProcurement Strategy and the drivers behind this policy. Many of the topics he will address are relevant to supply chain leaders in the U.S., Canada and across the globe.

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.

The only way to fix what's broken in healthcare is through transformative change. Those hospitals and healthcare systems that have successfully cut costs and are generating greater revenue are the ones that have looked at the big picture, broken away from old practices and fundamentally changed the way they are doing business.

What do healthcare and professional football have in common? Perhaps more than you might think. Denver Broncos Quarterback Peyton Manning shared his perspective when he spoke to the American Hospital Association (AHA) Leadership Summit in San Diego. As he put it, football and healthcare both operate in environments with “clear boundaries, strict rules, and almost zero margin for error,” although I am not so sure about the clear boundaries any more (more on that later, along with some other Manning insights). Where I really see the similarity is what you do when conditions change – you call an audible. That’s what Manning does, and the team responds. I would say it’s time not only to call an audible in healthcare, but to change the nature of the game. While there is certainly a lot of talk about healthcare needing to change, some of the other commentary at the AHA Summit indicated there is a lot more talk than action...at least not the kind of action that those who pay for a large percentage of healthcare – America’s employers – want to see.     

At the recent GHX 2014 Supply Chain Summit, I sat in the audience and listened to CEO Bruce Johnson and others describe the many challenges inherent in our healthcare system.  Consumers will say the cost of care is too high.  Economists will say the rapid rate at which the cost of delivering care is increasing is unsustainable. And healthcare business leaders will say that we must act fast to reduce costs while increasing quality and safety for successful outcomes.  Johnson described this situation as the rebalancing of the cost/quality equation, and called healthcare leaders at the Summit to collaborate to help drive elimination of redundancy, variability and waste in our system.

At the recent GHX 2014 Supply Chain Summit, I sat in the audience and listened to CEO Bruce Johnson and others describe the many challenges inherent in our healthcare system.  Consumers will say the cost of care is too high.  Economists will say the rapid rate at which the cost of delivering care is increasing is unsustainable. And healthcare business leaders will say that we must act fast to reduce costs while increasing quality and safety for successful outcomes. 

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.

Folks may not know see the linkages clearly yet, but the supply chain connection to cost, quality and outcomes is all around….at the HIMSS 14 Conference in Orlando, within the halls of the FDA and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), even in the Wall Street Journal. 

I get to talk with a lot of people around the industry and based on these conversations, I want to share five goals you might consider to help you – and your company – drive transformational, end-to-end change across the healthcare supply chain: