Now that group purchasing contracts aren’t yielding the double-digit savings that they once did, we are providing our clients with three new strategies to dig even deeper to uncover additional healthcare supply chain savings as follows:
1. Study Your Pharmacy Drug Utilization. It shouldn’t be a surprise to you that your prescription drugs are busting your hospital, system, or IDN’s budget with cost per inpatient admission jumping by 38.7% between 2013 – 2015, according to the University of Chicago NORD. Just as important, NORD reported that growth in inpatient drug spending has far outpaced payer reimbursement and pharmaceutical price inflation. Worse yet, now generics aren’t cheap anymore either. That’s why your healthcare organization needs to identify favorable and unfavorable drug utilization trends, as well as maintain strict formulary discipline.
2. Analyze Your Reference Lab Test Utilization. Reduction in Medicare test payment rates (as high as 35%-45% for the most common tests) over the last few years has been a financial blow to all hospitals. Further, physicians are notorious for ordering too many tests, ignoring your test formulary, and even ordering non-reimbursable tests. By establishing a Reference Lab Test Task Force to analyze your reference lab test utilization at least quarterly, you can save thousands of dollars a year.
3. Scrutinize Your Blood Utilization. It’s not unusual for us to uncover savings in excess of $500,000 in utilization misalignments (wasteful and inefficient consumption, misuse, misapplication, or value mismatch) in blood usage data. Again, by establishing a Blood Management Task Force, meeting quarterly, you can easily identify these utilization misalignments and bring them in control.
As you can see, it isn’t our job to just get the best price at the pump. We now need to dig down even further into our supply streams to identify our hospital, system, or IDN’s utilization misalignments to make up for our GPO savings shortfalls. As we have outlined above, drugs, reference lab, and blood are a good place to start to make these new and better healthcare supply chain savings happen.
P.S. If you would like to learn more about our Stratify™ Drug, Lab Reference Test, or Blood Utilization Management Systems just e-mail me at [email protected].
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