Mobile phones, personal tablets, and high tech devices are part of our everyday lives. This is also becoming the case in the healthcare industry. The term mHealth, which is short for mobile health, is defined according to HIMSS as “the use of mobile and wireless devices to improve health outcomes, healthcare services and health research”. Employees and organizations alike can benefit from increased productivity and lower costs from mobile device usage in the healthcare space.
With purchased services categories representing up to 45% of your organization’s non-labor expenses, you should be monitoring your spend the same way you do with medical and surgical products. I only know of three or four health systems that are doing this right now. One of the major problems is that many supply chain leaders believe their GPO is monitoring this information for them. Although there are other ways to maximize your relationship with your GPO, at this time, the GPOs are not able to provide the service of monitoring purchased services spend because they don’t have the knowledge or necessary technology to handle this type of data.
