SciQuest is an e-procurement software company, positioned as a “provider of comprehensive spend management capability.” But its solution orientation and messaging to the healthcare marketplace is refreshingly different.
Why? Because SciQuest’s roots are not in healthcare. And that’s proving to be to its advantage. The company has been a successful, long-term provider of e-procurement solutions to the Life Sciences, Higher Education and Public Sector markets, so its healthcare perspective is relatively uninhibited. No offense to GHX or any of the other recognized brands in healthcare e-procurement, but SciQuest has been connecting suppliers to buyers over the Internet since shortly after the introduction of the graphical browser in 1994. In fact, it may have been one of the very first Internet-based e-procurement solution providers.
The company’s early history is rich. It rode the Internet application wave of the 90’s and “wiped out” with most everyone else when that wave finally crashed. But unlike many others, SciQuest survived. It re-surfaced when the markets stabilized and after a successful reorganization, the company grew profitably. SciQuest (SQI) is now listed on the NASDAQ and maintains a strong cash position under consistent leadership.
Within healthcare, SciQuest’s procurement applications roll up under a solution umbrella it calls a Virtual Item Master. The underlying premise is this:
Storing information and managing it is not the same thing. Current generation item masters are limited repositories of basic product information. The way they continue to be implemented and how they’re still licensed and utilized reflects a relatively simple data warehousing mentality that is useful, but lacking in essential functionality. For example, most item masters are used to store commodity products, inventoried items and generic service information. They are not typically used to store Physician Preference Items (PPI) or purchased service contracts. And because they’re limited, concerning the information they store, they can’t fully address compliance or deliver on the benefits of contract management.
The SciQuest approach unifies all product, service, pricing and contract information in one repository. That includes a hospital’s existing item master, its GPO contracts, self managed contracts, PPI contracts, service contracts and non-contracted goods and services. Everything: including all the contract information details (e.g. volume and market share based discount schedules, rebates). If knowledge is power, this certainly gives a big kick to the capability and influence of healthcare procurement and supply chain organizations within their organizations by providing both a visibility and compliance platform that spans a broad diversity of areas.
Leveraging a core library of data integration routines born through years of experience of managing all types, the Virtual Item Master syncs and matches all item master SKUs to the supplier linked content, other internal stored information and callable routines. We’re talking about bringing it all together — all contracts for all products and services — from multiple GPOs and any other information source (e.g. external databases, MMIS, ERP extracts, etc.) into a single environment.
The Virtual Item Master then visually presents various configurable views of that information in a searchable and familiar online catalog format. Frontline users are driven to specific buying outcomes by linking just approved items to their respective contract terms — this capability is at the front end of the process. In turn, this insures compliance as a default state and creates a real-time view into spending and spend controls.
Think of the possibilities. To manage variance in supply utilization, procedures could be matched to predefined product order sets. That idea wouldn’t be new to SciQuest, as it has executed analogous visions for other industry sectors. “It’s on the drawing board,” according to Krista Fuller, the company’s market director. The system can already be configured to support most any SCM defined purchased service protocol, so taking this step seems predestined. Ms. Fuller went on to identify an additional, albeit unexpected user benefit. “Our customers love our search capability. They can’t believe how quickly they can find what they’re looking for, despite the fact that we’re talking about millions of items whose descriptions are often unintuitive, if not confounding.”
SciQuest products are delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, so customers pay a fixed subscription fee. Sometimes you can tell a lot about a company based on the company it keeps. SciQuest partners include Lawson, Oracle, BravoSolution, Concur, OB10, Huron Partners and Provista.
In summary, the SciQuest Virtual Item Master synchronizes your internal marketplace to any/all external market opportunities you choose to leverage — and clearly, that includes vendors of other complementary tools and services. From a market perspective, SciQuest is a case in point that when a provider properly abstracts its core competencies — in this case, data integration and visualization, among others — it’s easy to recast a product set as healthcare-specific enabling technology.
- Tom Finn
