Healthcare Supply Chain Best Practices Podcast Robert Yokl

A Special Interview with Mark Copeland

Let’s face it, inflation, clinical labor shortages, and market conditions are doing a number on our health systems’ bottom lines and forcing organizations to find new and better ways to eke out costs while maintaining quality and outcomes. This is easier said than done. Group purchasing organizations and your own custom contracting are readjusting to the new normal, but inflation has taken away the majority of what I call “home run savings opportunities” that we once had. There are still some singles and doubles with savings that can add up, but they just aren’t what they used to be, nor can they alleviate the hit our health systems’ bottoms lines are taking. None of this is new to anyone in the healthcare industry, we all know what the market conditions are. The big question is, where are we going to get the next major level of savings to start hitting doubles, triples, and even home runs again in the savings department?

A new year will no doubt challenge many in our supply chain industry to up our game to new levels that we never thought possible. Let’s face it, there is a heck of a lot of change going on and higher demands from our Chief Financial Officers to optimize costs to mitigate the budgetary shortfalls that all health systems are seeing. All this on top of the new product requests, contract conversions, recall facilitation, and managing teams and projects. This year could be a daunting year if you don’t have some form of strategic plan with clear-cut goals and objectives.

Timing is everything and it does apply to the cost/value/quality world in our healthcare supply chain. In a perfect world, you would want to take the time and have your value analysis teams review all of their major product and/or service category spends and wring the towel dry on savings. But given that the average hospital purchases anywhere from 5K to 25K line items (major systems can be 25K to 85K in SKUs) with over 2,000 contracted categories, there just isn’t enough time in our teams’ agendas to undertake this. This is a tough challenge that you need to be prepared for.

Cost optimization is the art and science of saving money for our healthcare organizations and, at one time, used to be fairly easy by just implementing that right group purchasing contract and garnering the savings that the contract would bring at the best tier level. This has dramatically changed in the past few years with the record inflation and market conditions all but eliminating the big savings we once got from our group purchasing organizations. So where do we go from here? No matter where you take your organization in the next level of cost optimization, you will need to incorporate the following dynamics into this next level of savings.

What is the point of signing a new or renewal contract with the goal of saving money if the savings do not materialize as planned? That’s what savings validation is all about. In fact, here are four ways to leverage savings validation for maximum results.