2012 Trends: Providers, GPOs work together to decrease costs and maintain quality
When it comes to supply chain management, it isn’t just about moving boxes anymore, said Ed Raeke, director of materials management at Massachusetts General Hospital. Spending trends in 2012 will move toward reducing operating expenses for hospitals by effectively using the analytics and tools offered by GPOs.
“It’s about what’s the expense, and how we can contract substantially better.” said Raeke. “How can we look at standardizing across, whether it’s a network of hospitals, or even within a hospital, to try to maximize cost savings opportunities?”
Providers are being forced to work more closely with their GPOs in order to dramatically drive costs out of the system while maintaining high quality patient care.
“You’re starting to see more and more private label products coming out,” said Raeke. “Manufacturers are trying to expand their offerings through the distributors so that basically you get the generic version of a product instead of the private label.”
Pete Allen, senior vice president, sourcing operations for Irving, Texas.-based supply contracting company Novation, said suppliers and distributors have retrenched a bit, and must make sure that they elect to move forward with the right vendors in 2012.
“The only way they’re going to do that is by reducing the number of vendors that they do business with,” said Allen. “That’s going to make winners and losers in the marketplace more distinct, so I think there are a lot of pressures on all sides of the fence, but it’s achievable.”
Allen said Novation is working to play an even larger role for their membership, helping to control costs and offering a robust purchase services contract portfolio while “continuing to make strategic investments in the areas where I think there is still untapped potential.”
Richard Perrin, president and owner of Annapolis, Md.-based AdvanTech, Inc., hopes providers and vendors move toward upgrading the capabilities of their systems with tools that enable further effective and efficient harmonization of bar code, RFID and traceability in healthcare worldwide.
“I think that several of the major informatics providers for healthcare providers really have systems that don’t provide or don’t take advantage of occurrence integrated informatics solutions to link logistics as a core component as a cost structure,” said Perrin.
But, when it comes down to it, one of the most important trends to consider is teamwork, and the idea that providers and GPOs need to reach out and work together in order to achieve the best possible quality, said Raeke.
“I think we’re all in the same boat and I think that’s probably the most important thing in this whole trend,” he said. “We’re talking about how can we collectively make our materials leaders strong and putting out a curriculum to help them. At the end of the day we want our hospitals to be successful but it doesn’t mean that we can’t be here as a resource to help other people.”
