Healthcare Matters

After two years of research, including video taping how it’s currently done in the OR and 800 interviews with manufacturers, administrators, physicians, nurses and supply chain professionals, GHX announced a bold and strategic move yesterday. As Derek Smith, the company’s EVP of Marketing & Product Management said to me, “we will do for Physician Preference Items (PPI) what we did for medical surgical instruments.” What’s he’s talking about is delivering an infrastructure-level PPI supply chain solution to the industry –a solution that will allow providers, GPOs and manufacturers to collectively automate their shared business processes.

Yesterday, GHX announced its acquisition of a technology called “Beep N Track” from a French orthopedic company  named Implanet. As a point of interest, the roots of the company’s name are not derived from the words “implant” and “planet”or meant to symbolize a global domination mentality (silly me). Rather, it’s a contraction of the words “implant” and “Internet.”  It’s meant to represent how the company’s products are encoded for intelligent traceability and that you only need access to the Internet to enjoy all the related benefits.

In fact, what GHX just bought is a comprehensive product information tracking system capable of being abstracted for use across an entire industry.  Although it’s a proven technology (already in use) that was specifically developed and refined to manage the complexities of Implanet’s implant systems, GHX will extend the system’s capabilities to manage the similarly intricate and sophisticated information management requirements of other physician preference items (PPI) and make it available to all manufacturers.

At all meaningful touch points, the Beep N Track system automatically captures all relevant supply chain and regulatory data –from the point of manufacture through the point of use. It enables a complete audit trail for manufacturers, intermediaries and hospital staff alike; is “open” in the sense that it can leverage any smart device capable of reading a tag/logging an event along the way; and uses the Internet to ensure secure transmission and on demand access to all the relevant information by any/all authorized stakeholders.

Just like we’ve been told this stuff is supposed to work.

But you need a company capable of pulling it off at scale –and that’s why this announcement is meaningful. You need a company that has already earned “the trust” by successfully integrating the shared business processes of the manufacturers, GPOs and providers throughout the chain. And with several GPOs, more than 85% of the hospitals in the US and 80% of the suppliers already connected, GHX is the logical choice.  Hat’s off to GHX for going after this solution and kudos to Implanet for recognizing the right home for its technology.

If all goes well in the pilots that are now getting started, GHX expects to have this system fully integrated with its other core systems and ready for launch by this time next year.  There will be lots to talk about between now and then and we intend to stay abreast.

So back to Derek’s point, GHX just bought an enabling technology in support of a big idea. And when GHX completes the task of combining and/or integrating it with its other cloud-based supply chain applications, the benefits should be game changing.

—Tom Finn