Healthcare Matters

Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System, an integrated healthcare delivery system based in Spartanburg, S.C., signed an agreement with ROi (Resource Optimization & Innovation) for access to ROi’s comprehensive suite of supply chain services, including group purchasing, strategic sourcing, utilization management and custom procedure pack manufacturing. The agreement marks the health care system’s commitment to develop a fully integrated supply chain based on the model built by ROi over the last decade.

“We chose to partner with ROi because their innovative business model is comprehensive, highly integrated with clinical operations and drives meaningful clinical, operational and financial improvements,” said Bruce Holstien, president and CEO of Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System.  “Collaboration with others is imperative and we look forward to joining ROi and other health systems to transform our industry.”

Said Gene Kirtser, president and CEO of ROi: “Our partner CEOs and their health systems are helping build momentum in our industry to break away from the traditional supply chain model in which critical functions like sourcing, contracting and distribution are outsourced, and looking to supply chain as a strategic partner in helping transform health care delivery.”

ROi was founded in 2002 by Mercy, the nation’s sixth largest Catholic health care system.  Today, ROi serves multiple health care customers who selected ROi based on what all will say is an innovative GPO model that integrates supply chain functions traditionally performed by commercial distributors, group purchasing organizations (GPOs), manufacturers and consultants.

Lynn Britton, president and CEO of Mercy (and former CEO of ROi), added, “The work of developing a supply chain through ROi has helped build a culture of collaboration that has been transformational for our entire health ministry. We’ve been able to link supply chain leaders and clinicians together to reduce costs,  streamline processes and to improve patient care. Supply chain has the opportunity to help health care systems transform into a more sustainable business and clinical model.” Spoken like a supply chain guy –because he is one.

ROi is not one of the usual GPO suspects. It has never really been considered a major competitive threat in the GPO space, largely, I suspect, because its business had been focused for a long time on being just Mercy’s supply chain arm. But the times they are a changing and ROi seems to have figured out how to leverage its differences. Although it provides traditional GPO services too, it markets itself as “a single-source, fully integrated supply chain solution, including group contracting, clinical and operational consulting, private label product sourcing, pharmaceutical repackaging, custom procedure tray manufacturing, print operations, purchasing and master item file management, distribution and transportation management.”

ROi was ranked the No. 1 provider in healthcare supply chain and No. 2 overall global supply chain in the 2011 Gartner Healthcare Supply Chain Top 25 – the only company to be ranked in the top three every year since the ranking was established in 2009.

Source: Embedded.com

—Tom Finn