Healthcare Matters

On the eve of its Supply Chain Summit being held next week in Orlando (May 7-9), GHX announced enhancements to its core exchange offering. Many of the upgrades are deep architectural re-designs that are being implemented to improve its core system performance (e.g. scale-, speed-, and security-related stuff), but not all.

It makes sense. GHX is strengthening its core infrastructure in preparation of supporting a much bigger market play –requiring a lot more functionality. Far more interesting to its established and future customers than system level improvements is learning how GHX is going to deliver the technology benefits it acquired through its purchase of Beep N Track –a track and trace solution developed by a French implant company.

As a reminder, when GHX bought Beep N’ Track, its idea was to do for Physician Preference Items (PPI) what it has done for med/surg. Although the system was specifically developed to manage the complexities of implant systems, GHX will extend the system’s capabilities to manage the similarly intricate and sophisticated information management requirements of other PPIs and make it available to all manufacturers. 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. The integration effort sounds like a lot of hard, but valuable work to me; there should be plenty of interesting news along the way.

Here’s the latest:

Louisville, Colo. – April 30, 2012 – GHX announced significant enhancements to the company’s healthcare supply chain infrastructure, the GHX Exchange, with new capabilities that will be introduced throughout the year. The GHX Exchange is the company’s infrastructure supporting $46 billion of medical-surgical spending in North America and provides the foundation for additional GHX supply chain services, such as data management solutions, tools that enhance price validation and visibility, online requisitioning capabilities and other supply management-related functions. New capabilities will support existing applications as well as the recently announced implantable device supply chain solution.

New development for the core architecture of the GHX Exchange will accommodate higher transaction volumes while helping ensure continued fast through-put for electronic business between trading partners. The enhanced GHX Exchange will enable additional redundancy and resiliency for this mission-critical solution that both suppliers and providers require, and depend upon, in today’s healthcare environment. Additional development includes enhancements to integration capabilities and the user experience.

“The GHX Exchange currently processes over $46 billion volume in transactions per year and is growing at nearly 20 percent a year on a compounded basis,‖ said Derek Smith, executive vice president, GHX. ―Our investment in this vital foundation is providing the platform for our upcoming implantable device solution as well as a host of other opportunities for our customers to get greater visibility into their supply chain.”

Members of the GHX Global Network, including over 4,000 hospitals in North America are transacting business with over 10,000 of the medical-surgical suppliers via the GHX Exchange. The GHX Exchange transaction volumes are expected by GHX to double or even triple in the next few years as members of the GHX Global Network accelerate their use of e-business capabilities, and include more types of document processing such as e-invoices and those supporting the purchase, use and billing of implantable devices.

The new architecture also includes enhancements to the user interface, providing more streamlined functionality and a new look-and-feel across GHX products. Soon, GHX Exchange users subscribing to GHX Procurement solutions will be able to access Procurement Suite via a new interface that allows single sign-on and enables data to flow more seamlessly between products in this suite. The new GHX Exchange architecture will be extended to all solutions, with Procurement Suite the first to be impacted by the enhancements.

The GHX Exchange was first deployed in 2000 and has since established nearly 300,000 unique trading partner relationships. Over the past two years, the Exchange and related services has helped participants in the GHX Global Network to take $1.9 billion out of the cost of healthcare, making significant progress toward the GHX five-year goal of $5 billion in cost reductions.

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I’ll be attending the GHX Supply Chain Summit next week and have interviews scheduled with top GHX executives. Feel free to drop me a note, as a comment, expressing any questions you might like for me to pose.

—Tom Finn