Beyond access: vendor management systems offer expanded options

Nebraska Medical Center wanted to control vendors’ access to its facilities, so it tried implementing its own vendor management system. When that didn’t work out, the medical center contracted with a company supplying a vendor management system, which allows the medical center to do more than simply track the vendors coming to its facilities.

Most hospital administrators choose to implement vendor management systems to keep track of who is in the facility, what they are doing in the facility and to make sure the vendors have the training the organization wants them to have, said Tim Adams, director of leadership development at the American Society for Healthcare Engineering, but today’s vendor management technologies allow for expanded uses.

Nebraska Medical uses Reptrax, a web-driven healthcare vendor credentialing service created by IntelliCentrics, to create monthly benchmarks to determine how many representatives come into the facility each month and how many are compliant with Joint Commission directives, said Bob Ruis, the medical center’s purchasing manager.

While hospitals are required by the Joint Commission to identify individuals entering facilities and their purpose, they are not required to achieve this identification by using vendor management systems, said Greg Goyne, vice president, marketing, at IntelliCentrics. From research IntelliCentrics has done, the company estimates about 70 percent of hospitals have some sort of vendor credentialing system in place, he said.

“It is true that the initial motivation for many facilities to adopt a vendor credentialing system was that it was a way to control access,” Goyne said. “Today, however, when asked what benefits they have experienced, the top two answers are compliance with laws and regulations and a safer environment.”

As for Nebraska Medical Center, using the Reptrax system has been more efficient and effective than their home-grown version, which was time intensive for staff and eventually ignored by vendors, who had to check in at a building two blocks away from the nearest hospital entrance and four blocks from the farthest entrance, Ruis said.

Goyne believes that as much benefit vendor credentialing systems like Reptrax’s offer hospitals, to reap the most from them requires commitment from hospital leadership and staff. “… the true benefits of patient safety are realized by those organizations whose leadership has created a culture of vigilance around visitor security,” he said. “The best-in-class have engaged and operationalized their entire staff so everyone in the hospital is looking for visitor badges. If they see someone without a badge, they stop them and direct them to a kiosk to check in.”