Healthcare Matters

We have given a significant amount of coverage to GHX’s move to provide the industry with its first comprehensive implantable device supply chain solution. Over time and without a doubt, this same solution will be abstracted to handle other high dollar, high preference items, allowing the company to make good on its goal to do for Physician Preference Items (PPI) what its existing solutions have done for the more generic, med/surg categories of spend.

The company has made numerous strategic acquisitions over the last few years; it has entered partnerships and cut deals with niche technology providers to ensure its control of the full complement of enabling “raw materials.” And the pay-off seems imminent.  Its customer pilot programs have been highly productive, yielding process insights that are serving to fine tune the first release of its solution, which is on schedule for release in the first quarter of 2013.

GHX just released a list of best practices. Call them the “distilled insights” gained from the experience of its ongoing customer pilot programs. As we have frequently pointed out in these pages –call it a general rule of thumb—technologies don’t necessarily enable new processes, they accelerate good ones. And based on the following list, GHX certainly seems to “get it.”

• Drive Contract Price Visibility and Accuracy. Healthcare providers need improved ways to manage prices for items being purchased both on- and off-contract.  Best practices: Identify products a provider is frequently purchasing and at what prices; identify products being purchased off-contract; identify like products and determine whether they can be grouped onto contracts for future purchases; assimilate those items onto group purchasing organization (GPO) or supplier contracts.
• Prepare for Unique Device Identifiers. Unique Device Identifiers (UDI) are the latest regulation to hit healthcare. Providers will benefit directly from the UDI if they are able to capture data at the point of use. And while the initial deadline for compliance is not until 2014, both providers and suppliers need to prepare now for those new requirements in order to create ways to capture the data and importantly, ways to leverage it. The UDI rules additionally impact suppliers by helping enable them to more accurately forecast demand and track recall information. Best practices: Create new levels of collaboration among providers and suppliers to identify ways to capture data needed by their organizations; create pathways and requirements for data sharing; create quality, repeatable processes for data sharing among trusted business partners.
• Create Visibility into Demand Signals and Forecasting. Suppliers need visibility into provider demand for their products. Today, most manufacturers have little visibility into the billions of dollars of product out in the field. Best practice: Connect the healthcare community with a shared infrastructure to create greater sources of aggregated data for improved demand planning and forecasting.
• Ensure Accurate Product Data and Inventory Repositories. Providers need to be ready to buy the right product and suppliers need to be ready to provide the right product. Best practices: Ensure accurate data sources for products and product identifiers; continuously enhance a shared repository of current information; help enable a view of items providers have in inventory; provide tracking of what providers actually use, and in turn, need.
• Deploy Perfect PPI Purchase Orders. One of the areas the providers and suppliers have identified as the “holy grail” of efficiency in a best practice organization is the “perfect PPI purchase order.” Achieving such a purchase order would drive increased operational and financial performance for all parties. The GHX Advisory Board Work Group defined the perfect PPI Purchase Order (PO) as electronic and requiring minimal human intervention. Best practice: Ensure all of the following for each order: Contains all required data elements; contains accurate data; supports having products available for next procedure; does not generate shipment of undesired products; has the correct price; does not result in an invoice dispute.
• Be ready and willing to change; understand there will be technical challenges in deploying any new solution; technical changes will need to be managed along with the challenges of people and process changes; rigorous change management programs support the requirements of lasting change.

According to its press announcement: “With development of this solution, GHX is building on its capabilities in cloud-based technology, expanding its cross-healthcare solution connecting supply chain, finance and clinical professionals with their suppliers and partners.”

Source: GHX

Getting supply, distribution and demand singing from the same sheet of music is the GHX specialty. And once that happens, all kinds of related benefits are enabled. For example, I can’t wait to report on the sourcing and procurement successes that will naturally follow successful implementations of this upcoming solution. They will be unavoidable.

—Tom Finn