Have You Planted Your Seeds?
What do perennial flowers and recurring supply expense savings have in common? The simple answer is that both can grow and bloom for many years if you use the right tools, provide adequate nourishment, and the proper care and placement.
Why? We have found that healthcare organization must plant seeds today in order to generate new savings tomorrow, next quarter or even next year. Otherwise, your supply expense savings will be short-lived or worst yet, die on the vine before being harvested.
Think about it this way. Your price savings are getting harder and harder to achieve since you and your GPOs have squeezed your suppliers’ margins to the bone. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t BIG robust savings to be obtained by more effectively managing and controlling your healthcare organization’s products, services and technologies’ in-use cost or as we like to call them utilization misalignments.
In fact, our studies show that there is as much as 7% to 15% in NEW supply expense savings available to you right now. You can do this by attacking your wasteful and inefficient consumption, misuse and misapplication within the millions of dollars of products, services and technologies that you buy annually.
Case Study: One of our 223-bed community hospital clients was getting an excellent price and rebates on their contrast media, but then they found using our UTILIZER™ Dashboard that their contrast media in-use cost was $42,666 higher than their peers. When this utilization misalignment was investigated by one of their hospital’s value analysis project managers, they found that their radiology department had standardized on 155cc prefilled syringes to administer their contrast media. Their community standard was 100cc doses! After several negotiation sessions with their radiology director, he finally agreed to only use 155cc doses on his liver function patients; thereby immediately reducing his hospital’s contrast media cost by $41,298 annually. This was a win-win for all involved parties!
Question! “How would you know where your utilization misalignments are hidden at your healthcare organization without having a power tool to plant the seeds to grow and bloom your savings every month, every quarter, and every year?”
The typical healthcare organization has 7,000, 14,000 or even 30,000 SKUs (stockeeping units) they must track, manage and control continuously to ensure that their pricing and utilization is truly within acceptable limits. This is an almost impossible feat for super busy supply chain professionals to accomplish without leveraging technology to do this hard work for you.
A new era of supply chain expense management has arrived: Utilization Management. In fact, a new survey by Novation reported that 44% of healthcare organizations have decided to focus on utilization as their new path to savings for their hospital, systems and IDNs. This is the reality of the supply chain of the future, since price savings are slowly, but surely disappearing!
Isn’t it time that you jump on this fast moving utilization train so that you can reap the full benefits of new and better supply expense savings that are not only sustainable, but inflation proof?
Filed Under: savingsblog • Utilization Management
