Rebates have become an acceptable best practice in healthcare supply chain management since vendors want you to earn discounts, not take them for granted. Yet, how do you know if you are receiving all of the rebate claims you are entitled to? Here are three ways to lose money with your rebates if you don’t have a system to manage them:
Losing Money With Rebates in Healthcare Supply Chain Management
1. Tracking Your Rebates Manually. If you are utilizing a home-grown methodology to manage your rebates, it is almost impossible to keep up with the volume of data that is required to match your rebates to your qualified commodity purchases. It would take a village to do so!
2. Using a Spreadsheet to Track Rebates. It seems that spreadsheets have become the Swiss Army knife for our time. Yet, it has been our experience that there comes a time when a spreadsheet has gone beyond its useful purpose and becomes a chokepoint, not a benefit. So, if you are still using spreadsheets to manage your rebate claims, maybe it’s time to invest in custom solutions to truly meet the requirements of your rebate management.
3. Depending on Your GPOs to Track Rebates. If you believe that your GPOs can accurately verify hundreds of thousands of rebates annually for their members, then you don’t understand the complexity of doing so. First, your GPO needs to utilize the downloads that you provide them for all of your purchases, then link them to the commodities receiving rebates and calculate exact formulas to receive accurate rebate validation. If you believe this can be accomplished without errors, then you are missing an opportunity to save thousands, or maybe millions, more in rebates annually.
Rebate Management System for Healthcare Supply Chain
Rebate management is becoming more complicated every day as more suppliers offer them as part of their group purchasing or local contract offerings. If your hospital, system, or IDN doesn’t have its own Rebate Management System, it could be losing millions annually. Don’t continue to lose money with your rebates. Take control of these hard to manage rebate claims. You will be rewarded by doing so!
P.S. We are planning to add a Rebate Management Module to our Savings Validator software. If you are interested in seeing how it can help your healthcare organization to better manage your rebate claims, just e-mail us at [email protected] for details.
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