The secret to surviving in challenging times is a balance of short-term and long-term strategies to keep your savings flowing in good times and bad.
Tendency to Beat Up on Your Suppliers
There is a tendency to beat up on your suppliers in challenging times, but your suppliers are having the same challenges you are in the new healthcare economy (i.e. lower profits, higher costs, and a disruptive marketplace). This is a short-term strategy which can hurt you over the long term when you will need your suppliers most to assist you with managing your patient population. Much better short-term strategies are to join a regional group purchasing organization, standardize on PPI items, increase your GPO compliance organization-wide, and of course knock down the major utilization areas if you can uncover them.
Stay Strategic with Your Strategies
Although the tendency for most of us in challenging times is to think short-term, it is mission critical that we think strategically with our approaches. For instance, with our national GPO savings diminishing and our regional GPO savings peaking in a few years, we must make sure that we have the analytic capability and talent in place (internally or externally) to not only identify new savings opportunities, but to hold onto the savings that we have already achieved.Â
The Best Stratagems Give You Both Short and Long-Term Savings
The best savings stratagem you can put in place for your hospital, system, or IDN is a savings strategy that will not only save you now but also save you over the long term. This strategy is utilization management analytics. This will enable you to uncover where your utilization savings opportunities are today and be able to act on them immediately and strategically.
The good news is that because you put a utilization management system in place you will be able to uncover the next round and the next round and the next round, etc…of savings opportunities. Your goal is no longer just to obtain the right product at the right price for the right customer, but to ensure that the customer is utilizing the optimal amount of product inherent with their procedural and operating levels. Hospitals have over 267 major product categories that need to be managed. The only way to keep all of these categories under control, over the short and long term, is to commit to a utilization management program today.
Analytics Is the Future of Healthcare
Analytics, or the study of patterns, trends, and anomalies in your healthcare organization’s data, isn’t a passing fad but a healthcare revolution to control costs and improve quality. It’s our guess that your healthcare organization is using analytics today to predict which patients will be readmitted within 30 days, who will develop infections, and who will not pay their deductibles in a timely fashion. So you see, analytics are here to save. Our question is, are you ready for this revolution? If not, why not?