Hospital Purchased Services

The cost of healthcare is rising on a near regular basis, driving hospitals towards finding sharper and more impactful methods of saving money regularly. Fortunately, the continued advancement of technology can dramatically help hospital managers identify these savings methods with a relatively new technology, ensuring hospitals can achieve extensive savings in hospital purchased services.

In this instance, the definition of purchased services refers to the automated use of data and algorithms to identify the best way to buy critical medical and surgical services. Access to this state-of-the-art technology is critical in a healthcare setting that uses many services daily. Indeed, hospitals and healthcare networks use a vast number of services in the execution of clinical care. Given the near-constant need to execute medical services, hospital purchasing departments must constantly identify ways to reduce costs and protect already thin profit margins.

In other words, the meaning of purchased services ensures that hospitals can use data to automate savings discovery. This definition applies to thousands of subgroups of products and services, meaning that hospitals need to be able to identify ways to save money in all of these areas.

Furthermore, purchased services refer to more than just supplies. It also refers to outside services, including accounting, HR, and clinical services. Hospitals often in-source these services and have the staff on hand to manage these efforts. However, the near-constant tension of whether or not to keep staff on hand can lead to significant cost disparities. To that end, hospitals must be extraordinarily nimble and identify ways to potentially outsource these services.

When used correctly, purchased services in healthcare can reduce costs in even more indirect ways. These days, there is a near-limitless array of opportunities for hospitals to find ways to achieve savings. Continued digital technology, the rise of SaaS models, and the expansion of the healthcare sector present incredible opportunities for hospitals and healthcare networks to achieve financial savings. However, this rise in services also presents unique challenges: No department can track where these services exist and how they can be used.

To that end, hospital-purchased services can achieve significant financial savings in purchasing services but also help purchasing departments save days’ worth of time. Instead of manually searching for affordable services or relying on outside consulting groups, hospitals can use the Valify model to ensure they get the best bang for their buck. Valify is a tech-enabled SaaS model that uses the latest data to ensure hospitals get the best possible price on their purchased services. Valify uses data to monitor market performance and help hospitals find affordable purchases.

All this means more cost savings to your hospital, reduced strain on your purchasing department, and a reduced need to monitor market performance manually. With your services properly managed, you and your team can concentrate on executing world-class healthcare, leaving data monitoring to validate.

Types of Hospital Services

At Valify, we understand a hospital manager’s challenges. Simply put, you have to manage a nearly innumerable list of types of hospital services. We’ve broken down the list into seven different services, including:

• Financial and administrative services, such as accounting, billing, and more.
• Facility support includes hospital laundry services, hospital linen services, hospital cleaning services, food service for patients and staff, and hospital waste management.
• HR management, which can be done in-house or outsourced. This area includes hiring, firing, onboarding, and temporary staffing.
• IT & Telecom services, including the management and execution of all computer hardware and software.
• Clinical services, including managing labs and dealing with outpatient services.
• Insurance management includes executing employee benefits, dealing with malpractice claims, and more.
• Miscellaneous, ancillary services, such as valley parking or courier services.

As you can see, this is an incredibly widespread array of services – perhaps more so within the hospital business than in any other industry. This reality can make managing these services challenging, fragmented, and deeply complex. With this many services under your management control, you will need to ensure that all services are being properly executed and that they are being done in the most affordable way possible.

Saving money and operating services most efficiently can be a major challenge in various respects. On the one hand, your hospital will not want to constantly be switching services, moving back and forth between different companies to execute critical hospital functions, like IT or lab management. However, that makes getting the most affordable price even more important — if you are locked into a long-term contract, you need to know you are getting the best deal possible.

Furthermore, you will want to ensure excellent prices and an adequate offering of services from the vendors you contract with. After all, there’s no point in using a third-party vendor to execute vital hospital services if that vendor won’t ultimately do what you need.

This is where we come in. At Valify, we have experts in a variety of hospital services. Our team can work with yours and help you better manage hospital services. As such, we can help you:

• Save money on critical administrative, financial, and medical services.
• Ensure that you are getting everything you need out of all of your hospital services.
• Help you identify ways to maximize flexibility and ensure stability in your hospital services.

Finally, we can do so in a way that is based on data rather than intuition. Our Spend Analytics technology platform can help you take the above seven categories and divide them into more than 1,400 distinct subcategories, allowing you to determine where your money is being spent and where there may be a need for improvements. These analytics can be critical to saving your hospital money, as you can use them to identify rogue spending, find market leaders, and make better, data-driven determinations about what contracts you should renew. Such a system can also be crucial in multi-hospital networks, as it can enable you to see where in your network you are spending your money, thus enabling you to make localized improvements that can better manage costs.

Hospital Purchasing Consulting

Valify offers purchased services consulting that can majorly improve the quality and cost of your hospital procurement. Our expertise in hospital outsourcing ensures that your hospital can keep the costs associated with purchased services in healthcare to a minimum.

We get it: A purchased department in your hospital may not contain the resources necessary to manage all outside organizations properly, and using a hospital purchasing group or purchasing organizations may not yield the moment-by-moment, data-driven insights that your hospital needs. In instances like that, the hospital purchasing consulting provided by Valify may be critical to your organization.

Our services can help the procurement department in your hospital in four different ways.

First, our spend visibility platform offers immediate insights that ensure you know what you are spending your money on, what the trend of that spending is, where the money is being spent, and where there may be opportunities for cost reductions. This significantly advanced platform is likely more in-depth than anything your purchasing department already has on hand. As such, we offer robust solutions that your team would not be able to offer otherwise. This data is updated to the second, thus ensuring that your hospital team always has the information it needs on hand.

Next, we offer accelerated sourcing. In other words, our complex solution can ensure that the next RFP you offer is as easy as possible. We do this by ensuring that your team can pinpoint benchmarks within your organization, allowing you to know what and how much you need. We also offer an eRFP solution, enabling you to send out a comprehensive and wide-ranging RFP with the click of a few buttons. With a system that tracks more than 550,000 vendors, you can easily determine where there might be opportunities to save money.

Our entire system is built around helping you achieve sensible savings and real cost reductions in various areas. Our WorkPlan platform offers many features, including:

• Customizable alerts that let you know when unapproved spending has occurred.
• Data quality alerts that inform you when the data you are using may be less than accurate, as well as in-depth information that ensures you know where this money is being spent.
• The ability to track and monitor specific spending goals and then assign those goals to different facilities or departments.

All this information enhances our data-driven approach to saving you money in hospital-purchased services.

Lastly, our platform offers you diverse insights that can monitor purchasing decisions. By partnering with Valify, you can ensure that you meet organizational diversity goals regarding the number of vendors, the amount spent, and more. You can use our system to easily determine who potential diverse vendors are, where you are spending money on diverse vendors, and where there may be opportunities to increase your diversity spending. You can also choose how much to factor this diversity spending, thus enabling you to determine a customized approach to diversity within your organization.

Ready to take the next steps in your cost-reducing efforts, or interested in hearing more about how the Valify system can be customized to fit your needs? Contact Valify today and learn more about how we can help your organization.