One of the biggest difficulties healthcare purchased services professionals face is trying to negotiate more favorable vendor contracts for their hospital or health system. With hundreds of vendors spread across numerous departments and facilities, it is nearly impossible — without the right data analytics platform — to have enough time and information to build a persuasive case.
Visualizing purchased services spending is essential for controlling costs at any hospital or health system. After all, purchased services comprise 45 percent of a hospital’s non-labor budget. The ability to drill down on spending across a well-organized hierarchy of more than 1,200 potential purchased services categories provides an even more precise picture of how dollars are being spent. Spending data alone, however, offers only directional insights.
Over the last 10-15 years, Value Analysis teams have successfully implemented cost savings initiatives for commodities, physician preference items, and even pharmaceuticals. However, an area that is often overlooked by Value Analysis committees is Purchased Services.
In the healthcare world, group purchasing organizations (GPOs) have established their place for streamlining vendor selection and cost savings on products. However, these organizations do have their limits and can’t be relied on for every single aspect of your hospital’s spend management and cost control.
Most of the topics I have written about on this blog have been about how to save hospitals money, but in reality, the real goal is to increase their overall performance. So instead of listing out another purchased services area to help save your bottom line, today we will discuss an interesting way to increase top line revenue within your hospital by showing you the marketing value of the crowds of people walking through your organization every day.
Many times, data analysts and contract negotiators find themselves neck deep in what seems to be garbage or uncategorizable data. This leads to wasted time and increased frustration that could be better spent finding savings opportunities instead of data scrubbing.
Medical malpractice is a phrase that makes doctors across the nation blanch. Whether from claims that are justified or frivolous, our society is all too happy to pull the trigger on initiating litigation against health care providers who we feel haven’t done their job correctly.
If you don’t know where you are, you’ll have a hard time getting where you need to be. For getting from one physical location to another, smart phones and GPS have largely made this problem a thing of the past, but it’s just as true for non-geographical things, such as financial goals. Hospitals are being asked to find opportunities to cut spending—but if you don’t know the current state of your spending, how will you know where you should start cutting costs?
Let’s face it. There are some companies that intimidate us when it’s time to negotiate a new agreement. I’m not afraid to say it, and I’ve been doing this a long time. Technically, you might not be intimidated as much as you are feeling like you don’t have any negotiating power, which to me is a little intimidating. But that’s how these blue chip companies got so big in the first place. They make you feel like you have no oth er option or you might lose your job. Whats the old saying, Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM?
