“As we are halfway through 2025, I thought it would be a good time to highlight some areas that you can speed up your value analysis workflow with new product requests.”
Healthcare supply chain departments are the funnel for which new products are evaluated, approved, or not approved in health systems throughout the country. Each supply chain department does this a little differently, but 95% deal with similar data, evidence, and processes within their value analysis workflow. This can become quite cumbersome and tedious for the VA Managers who quarterback these new products through the workflow process.
As we are halfway through 2025, I thought it would be a good time to highlight some areas that you can speed up your VA workflow with new product requests. The results we are looking for are to make your VA teams more efficient and have better information with less work for VA, all while providing end customers with faster results for their new product evaluations.
Raising the Bar on New Product Requests
New product request evaluations are not going away, nor are healthcare organizations going to allow shortcutting of their important VA workflow procedures. The only way to move forward is with improved efficiency and timeliness of the entire VA workflow. Below are 5 best practices that I recommend you employ to greatly improve your VA workflow practically overnight.
1. Automate Manual Steps in Your VA Workflow – Hopefully you are not still dealing with basic paper or online forms that do not go into a true VA workflow software. If so, you need to buy, create, or borrow a system to do this for you. The automation advantage you will get from software will instantly give you much more time. For instance, SVAH provides customized VA Workflow for health systems that mirrors and enhances their paper systems. This allows our clients to continue to do business the way they want and need to do business and not have to conform to some other vendor’s canned system.
2. Train Your Physicians and Staff on New Product Request Submissions – Your end customers, users, and stakeholders will be the ones who will be filling out the new product request forms/software so it just makes sense to provide them with training on everything and anything that can happen with a new product request. You can work with your nursing education team to put together a great video so that all customers, users, and stakeholders will understand everything involved with a new product request in 2025 and beyond. Plus, you will want to continually update these training videos as new changes and updates occur with your VA workflow. Make sure you include timeline expectations, revenue reviews, evidence, and what to expect every time they submit.
3. Customize Your Workflow Further to Alleviate Bottlenecks – There are always small or sometimes large bottlenecks that occur in the VA workflow process that can chew up your time and resources on just about every new product request that enters your workflow. The best way to handle this is to find solutions or fixes to these bottleneck issues which will greatly improve your VA workflow and get results back to your requesters much faster.
4. Create an On-Demand New Product Request Submission Video for Sales Reps – All organizations have Vendor Reps who assist end customers such as Surgeons in their submission of new product requests for their hospital, but how much training do you provide them – if any at all? Without training, the sales reps are just going to wing it and try to do the best they can while doing the least that they can (human nature) to either submit the new product request themselves or provide the information to your submitting clinician. If you were to create an on-demand video and include it as a mandatory view for vendors through your Vendor Management & Security Software, this will ensure that you know that they have seen this video and you can hold their feet to the fire. I would go a step further and make sure there are reminders sent at least every 6 months for the Vendor Reps to re-watch these videos to ensure compliance.
5. Eliminate Anything That is Not Used or Not Working – I have seen new product requesters ignore whole screens and data elements on an ongoing basis at many health systems that just tend to accept that the requesters are not going to fill out certain sections/fields. Smart health systems realize this and eliminate these fields and replace them with more productive fields instead. This just makes sense versus trying to double down and demand that your end customers fill out the fields they never fill out now. If they or you did not fill these out and the NPRs still got completed, then you didn’t need that information in the first place. Move on and use this opportunity as a way to improve.
Remember, value analysis is the study of function of products and services to meet the requirements of our customers, stakeholders, and experts with equal or better quality and reliability. Why shouldn’t new product request VA workflow meet your requirements and standards and be subject to ongoing improvements that will benefit all who engage in this process for years to come? Strategically plan your changes, propose them to your VA steering committee, then get them implemented!
Below are some similar articles that you may find interesting.
4 Immutable Rules to Ensuring Revenue Integrity with New Product Requests in 2025 and Beyond
Taking the Next Steps to Lead Your Own Cost Optimization Beyond Price Program