I met Bruce Johnson shortly after he left GE Healthcare to join GHX as its Vice President of Marketing. If memory serves, it was sometime back in late 2000. I had sales and marketing responsibility for CombineNet at that same time and we met in Pittsburgh.
Bruce articulated a vision for a healthcare trading platform –not unlike what UCCNet and Transora were separately trying to pull off in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry (UCCNet and Transora eventually merged to form 1 SYNC). In turn, Bruce listened to me describe a complementary vision of Dr. Tuomas Sandholm’s, CombineNet’s Founder. One of Dr. Sandholm’s goals was to see his Intellectual Property (IP) used to optimally clear more “expressive” versions of the industry exchange that Bruce had just described.
Bruce is now the CEO of GHX. As they say in these parts, “he done good.” And GHX’s vision of a neutral and fully inclusive trading platform –inclusive of providers, distributors, GPOs and manufacturers– is being realized. GHX is now part of the industry’s supply chain infrastructure. If you know what a Venn Diagram is, then you probably know where I’m going with this. Venn Diagrams use circles to represent finite sets, with the position and overlap of those circles indicating the relationships that exist between those sets. That’s pretty much a textbook definition. Put it this way, these days in some capacity, GHX is overlapping with just about everyone’s “circle”–or cloud, if you prefer.
Based on yesterday’s press release (see below), go ahead and add AmeriNet to a growing number of GPOs that not only use at least one of GHX’s tools for its own purposes, but markets complementary GHX technologies to its members. According to the announcement, AmeriNet will be offering the GHX P2P application suite and its On Demand AP product, a solution for optimizing accounts payable workflow, to its 2900 members.
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ST. LOUIS and LOUISVILLE, Colo., Jan. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Amerinet, a national healthcare solutions organization, will offer its 2,900 acute care hospital members a suite of procure-to-pay (P2P) solutions from healthcare technology and services company GHX to help the hospitals improve procurement and accounts payable processes and drive contract compliance, resulting in up to 12 percent savings on medical-surgical supply spending.
In announcing the agreement for Procurement Suite and OnDemand AP®, Amerinet said its members will be able to take advantage of the full range of (P2P) capabilities offered by GHX, including item master management, real-time contract and price management, requisitioning and workflow control, and invoice automation.
Procurement Suite by GHX combines several technologies designed to provide visibility into, and control over, spend–especially non-file and off-contract spend. It helps enable process efficiency while driving contract compliance. Leveraging a content management platform (NuVia), contract optimization capabilities and connectivity to the majority of suppliers from which hospitals purchase products, Procurement Suite provides a foundation of accurate data with an easy-to-use interface designed to capture procurement occurring outside of materials management.
OnDemand AP automates the accounts payable (AP) process, helping healthcare providers realize increased efficiencies and reduced costs through touchless invoicing. It streamlines invoice receipt, document image and data capture, purchase order matching, exception management and workflow, enabling users to move toward 100 percent electronic invoicing. By shortening the invoice-to-payment cycle, hospitals can take greater advantage of early-pay discounts, maximize labor efficiencies and reduce hard-dollar costs–up to 50 percent in some cases.
“This is just another example of how our industry can bring costs down faster when it works together as a community,” said Bruce Johnson, GHX president and CEO. “GHX technology provides the engine that helps enable the industry to adopt better business practices so it can continue to provide high-quality patient care.”
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The GHX move underscores how important it is for infrastructure providers to “move up the stack” and deliver the business benefits at the application level. As said, GHX has been successful at the raw infrastructure level, so it’s only natural –and highly strategic– for it to start marketing the bundled application benefits.
—Tom Finn
