Healthcare value analysis practitioners need to think more about long-term results vs. short-term gains (e.g., GPO contract implementation) to up their value analysis game. Don’t miss multiple opportunities to enhance your VA program by enhancing its scope, responsibilities, tools, and methods. To give you more insight into this opportunity, here are 6 key elements that should be incorporated into your health system’s Total Value Analysis Program for optimal results:
1. Functionally analyze all products, services, and technologies on a continuous basis (three to five years): Things change and people change over a three to five-year period; therefore, there is always an opportunity for improvement.
2. Develop a “closed loop” system for the introduction of new products, services, and technologies: All new products, services, or technologies, with an annual spend of $25,000 or more, need to be evaluated by your VA teams. Meaning, you need to devise protocols to prevent back door selling and administrative approvals of requests that aren’t going through your VA process.
3. Uncover areas of waste and inefficiency in your supply/value chains: This is another term for “utilization misalignments” that represent 7% to 15% in new supply expense savings opportunities for your healthcare organization. If your VA teams are only touching the edges of meeting this goal and objective, then your VA job is only half done.
4. Customize all product, service, and technology purchases to your customer’s exact requirements: Most of your customer purchases are based on your vendor’s catalog specification, not on their actual functional specification. If you change this paradigm you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions, annually.
5. Eliminate all non-value-added features of the products, services, and technologies you are buying: For the most part, the products, services, and technologies you are buying now are too feature rich. If you reduce your product, service, and technology features to what is positively required, you then can dramatically reduce your annual supply spend.
6. Improve the quality and reliability of all products, services, and technologies you are purchasing: Believe it or not, your customers rarely report defective products, services, and technologies they are employing. They just adapt to their existence. Hence, it is your VA team’s job to ferret out these quality and reliability issues as an integral part of your VA process.
We would all like to think that we are doing everything we can to save money and improve quality and safety with our value analysis program, but as these six key elements show, you can always do more for optimum results. For there is no end game with healthcare value analysis!
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