It’s no secret that your hospital, system, or IDN is shedding staff and eliminating positions (even in value analysis and supply utilization disciplines) due to their ever-changing healthcare environment. This means you need to be even more economical with your own time and that of your value analysis team leaders and their team members. Especially, their involvement in the tasks, chores, and duties of your value analysis process. Here are four value analysis and supply utilization techniques to enable you and your VA teams to do more with less resources to meet this challenge head-on.
4 Value Analysis and Supply Utilization Techniques to Do More with Less Resources
In every endeavor, there are shortcuts to getting a job done, such as, using a power saw vs. a hand saw to cut wooden planks. It’s the same with value analysis and supply utilization. Here are four shortcuts we have discovered so you can do more with less resources:
- Employ data and analytics to uncover your best supply chain expense savings opportunities. If you aren’t employing data and analytics to identify your best VA savings opportunities, but instead are using your supply spend data or intuition to do so, you are going to be having many dry holes. Therefore, you need to employ a scientific approach (i.e., data and analytics) to precisely and surgically identify your best supply chain expense savings opportunities.
- Conduct virtual value analysis meetings to save time and money. No one really has the time for meetings any longer. Especially, if they need to commute from another building or campus as so frequently happens. This fact then provides an opening for virtual meetings (i.e., using web conferencing) to cut down on your VA team members’ travel time, meeting time, and distractions of in-person meetings. The bonus for you is that you will discover that your meeting attendance will significantly improve.
- Share your workload with your VA team leaders and members. With few exceptions, value analysis directors, managers, and coordinators try to do it all. By this we mean, value analysis professionals tightly controlling their value analysis studies from beginning to end vs. delegating their VA studies to their VA team leaders and team members. Remember, delegation is the secret to lightening your VA workload.
- Limit the number of new product, service, and technology evaluations. We see up to 33% more products, services, and technologies being approved per quarter at some healthcare organizations than are being denied. We believe there is something wrong with this picture, since this isn’t sustainable.
One answer to this quandary is to have each new product, service, or technology request approved on a department’s budget, by line item, before it can even be reviewed by your value analysis teams. We can guarantee you that this one new protocol will cut your new requests in half, if not more.
Doing Less with More is the New Normal for Value Analysis Professionals
If you haven’t figured it out already, you won’t be receiving any more value analysis or utilization management staff soon. Cost cutting is the new normal for healthcare organizations, so you will need to find new ways to manage your responsibilities or you will be swamped with work. These three ideas will be a good starting point for you to reinvent your value analysis and supply utilization processes. Think of it as fine tuning that every process needs every few years to maintain your competitive edge.