Healthcare Matters

Procurement roles continue to evolve –as do GPOs. From the purchasing of traditional commodities to managing the project-based sourcing of services, as we have said, no category of spend seems sacred anymore. If you can see it, you can professionally source it.

Enter construction services and the related capital equipment.

Some of North America’s largest retailers as well as its largest and most well known retail financial institutions are successfully sourcing this area of spend. And it’s catching on in healthcare too, where new construction, renovation projects and capital expense is huge. When combining subject matter expertise with software that has been customized to replicate the business processes of the trade, including the front-end bidding, design processes, budgeting and project management, automating these familiar processes is not just saving millions, but it’s quickly becoming recognized as a best practice.

So is it logical for a GPO to become more than just the messenger, but the deliverer of such good practice to healthcare?

Clearly, MedAssets thinks so and has partnered with a construction and capital equipment technology company called Attainia to start the process. Attainia provides solutions to manage the capital equipment lifecycle. Its systems are the world’s most widely used healthcare planning and budgeting applications. Customers include some of the largest healthcare architectural and planning firms, as well as healthcare integrated delivery networks and individual hospitals. Its cloud-based project planning and budgeting solutions are integrated with Attainia’s comprehensive catalog of manufacturers and products, so its “connection” to a larger contract portfolio –like MedAssets’– is straightforward.

What isn’t known is how aggressively MedAssets is going to get involved in supporting the electronic bidding side, because sourcing for a national contract portfolio and optimizing a competitive bid for a local construction project are not the same thing. We’ll find out together.

ATLANTA, Jun 21, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — MedAssets MDAS +3.55% today announced an agreement with Attainia, a construction and capital equipment technology company, to drive further client savings and cost containment. In an environment where healthcare organizations must do more with less, achieving optimum value from capital spending is more critical than ever to long-term business success. With this new agreement, organizations utilizing MedAssets Capital and Construction Solutions gain access to Attainia’s market-leading cloud-based solution suite for enhanced visibility and financial control of construction and renovation projects across all stages–from planning and predictive analysis to management.

“The combination of MedAssets construction project planning and management knowledge with Attainia’s market-leading technology solutions will serve to enhance MedAssets integrated, total cost management approach to improving project budget controls and investment in equipment and building upgrades,” said Cheryl Stoddard, vice president, Construction Solutions, MedAssets. “Attainia and MedAssets applications, in conjunction with the guidance of MedAssets experts, provide a competitive advantage to facilitate a transparent and collaborative construction environment to support on-time and on-budget high-cost category projects.”

The Attainia comprehensive solution suite includes the following modules:

• Budget: provides a dashboard view for providers to enter capital budget replacement requests and manage their approval workflow.
• Plan: provides a collaborative platform for managing capital equipment in projects of any size, from the early planning stage, through procurement and installation.
• Predict: provides visibility into all planned and budgeted capital by combining data from BUDGET and PLAN.
• Watch: provides sourcing decision support via a comprehensive healthcare capital equipment catalog that includes detailed product information, room templates and MedAssets contracts.

MedAssets Capital and Construction Solutions are part of the company’s national group purchasing organization portfolio and field data expertise. Client benefit from the ability to aggregate the purchasing of clinical and non-clinical equipment in alignment with clinical and business requirements. Overall project management is then applied to support achieving on-time and under-budget construction or renovation projects.

Currently, 80 healthcare organizations have elected to use MedAssets Capital and Construction Solutions, representing more than 500 facilities.

For example, Scripps Health, with five hospital campuses and 23 outpatient facilities, recently implemented MedAssets Capital and Construction solutions and services along with Attainia’s technology. The integration of both solutions enabled the facility to gain full visibility of all items and transactions and better communicate among stakeholders for consensus building in a more efficient timeframe. Source: MarketWatch.

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Good luck to this partnership. Given the size of the spends and the complexities of the projects, successful automation can deliver staggering value. Trust it; it’s already being done successfully and MedAssets is smart to package the opportunity for its customers.

—Tom Finn