It doesn’t matter how good you are at value analysis when it comes to being overwhelmed with new product requests, projects, conversions, and recalls. These things can take on a life of their own and consume all or most of your time. The challenge here is that there are a lot of good value analysis professionals that get caught up in this crunch and thus don’t last very long in their value analysis position due to this.
This article is for those of you who are feeling the crunch. You feel like your leaders don’t care, they just want you to continue to take care of business with end customers and stakeholders with the results you have been bringing to them. Little do they know that the more that gets piled on a VA professional or VA team, the less time they can focus on performing true value analysis. This then waters down the true value analysis effect and trickles through to your outcomes with new products, value analysis savings/quality initiatives, conversions, recalls, etc.
1. Keep Track of Your New Product Request Numbers – I remember talking to a VA Coordinator for a large eight-hospital health system who told me that they handled over 2,000+ new product requests in the previous 12 months. That was 250 new product requests per hospital and about 20 per month! That is simply too many to handle, no matter how big your staff is. If you are dealing with numbers like this, take a step back and examine where these new product requests are coming from and see why there are so many.
2. Put a Dollar Limit on New Product Requests – Putting 100% of NPRs through your value analysis teams is overkill. Put a dollar limit on how much goes through your teams and this will greatly reduce your numbers. We recommend a minimum annual spend of at least $25K for larger hospitals and perhaps $15K for community hospitals.
3. Have Requesters Talk to Supply Chain Before Submitting an NPR – Good systems ask their requesters to first run their new product request through their Supply Chain Representative before submitting. Why? Because they can assist them to see if some other hospital in the system already has this product and could be consulted for feedback. Also, they can tell you what the GPO-contract-friendly device is.
4. Don’t Make the Approval Process Part of Your New Product Request Workflow – If you make the approval process part of your new product request workflow, then of course you are going to have 30%, 40%, or even 50% more new product requests because anyone could give it a go to try to get a new product request submitted. The approval process overwhelms the workflow, even though you may automate it with software. Instead, be like our client hospitals and require that no new product request is submitted unless a budget holder and/or physician champion approves the request beforehand.
5. No More Quick New Product Requests – The days of the quick 24- or 72-hour new product request evaluation because a surgeon wants to perform a case on Friday need to disappear. This should be a thing of the past because there is too much at stake to evaluate the product correctly as well as the reimbursement and chargemaster results. There is much more sophistication in the value analysis piece of new products that fiscally, quality, and outcomes wise will require more time.
Let’s face it, we cannot curb all of the time consumers, but implementing the steps above will give you a little room to gain some of this crucial time back in your schedule as well as your agenda in your VA team meetings. These agendas are tight as it is, and all the set-up work that needs to be done beforehand just keeps piling on more and more, so having an extra 15-25 minutes will do wonders for you and your team.
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