Premier Inc. www.premierinc.com involved in healthcare has developed solutions to monitor productivity, how to generate onsite or regional reporting, report on population health management, and how to use supply analytics to improve payment models.
The Cape Fear Valley Medical Center located in Fayetteville North Carolina, www.capefearvalley.com/hospitals/cfvmc.html, a community hospital with more than 800 beds needed to deal with next generation cost management opportunities. The hospital needed help with the issue of how to reduce costs in purchased services. The fact is the hospital really didn’t know how much they were actually spending.
Due to a lack of access to local benchmarks, restricting contractual language make it difficult for the hospital to opt out of long term contracts and competing supply chain priorities within care delivery. Executives at Cape Fear were in a bind when trying to zero in on savings within this spend area.
They looked into the situation, approached Premier, and the next step was to partner with Premier to work to adopt a system-wide approach by creating a centralized contracting process. With assistance from Premier, an internal data tool was developed that allowed the hospital to see spending across all vendors and locations.
The next step was to implement supplier score cards to determine which vendors offered high value, high quality resources, services, and products which really helped the hospital. At this point, the hospital appointed personnel to study how the hospital could optimize contracts and service level agreements more favorably for the hospital.
The hospital using Premier’s assistance was able to integrate key performance indicators into contracts. The end result was $2.6 million in savings for purchased services across several target areas.