Just about every hospital and health system has a New Product Request Value Analysis Team in place to vet the new products that are brought in. This just makes sense as you must validate these products – otherwise, you are bringing in a new product on hope and a prayer with no track record of efficacy. That is not Value Analysis in 2025 and beyond. This article will highlight clear areas that healthcare organizations should be incorporating into their New Product Request Value Analysis Teams. These new strategies are being employed right now at forward-thinking hospitals and health systems. Perhaps you should consider them as well, as they are mission critical to the success of all new products evaluated today.
Paper Submission Forms Begone – The time has come to have your New Product Request Forms online and going into a database-driven application to manage your Value Analysis Workflow/Process. The days of sifting through files or binders with this original documentation are long gone and you should plan/budget to put a system in place that takes you into our digital age. This system needs to allow you to manage all aspects of new products, services, and even things like capital requests. It should be easy, searchable, and perform automations that are necessary – otherwise, your team leaders and members get bogged down in emails and paperwork instead of truly performing Value Analysis on these products and their outcomes.
Beyond the CPT Code Validation – Most organizations will ask for the CPT codes for reimbursement payments on their new product requests, which is great, but there is more to this than just obtaining the CPT codes. Yes, you want to validate that you will receive payment on the reimbursement for this new device or system – but there is more. During and after your trial process you will want to audit the actual payments that you received from all your payors to truly see what your range will be in these cases. This may also entail a few more trial evaluation cases than you normally allow but it will verify almost 100% what your reimbursement levels are going to be for each of your payers.
All Hospitals Are Not Created Equal in Value Analysis – Just because one or two hospitals in your health system have approval to use a product does not mean that everything is aligned for your hospital to use the product. The biggest issue could be reimbursement as some hospitals are able to attain reimbursements for many reasons while other hospitals in your system may not. Don’t assume that one size fits all when it comes to reimbursements and go that extra mile to verify during the trial periods with a simple audit with your finance reimbursement and chargemaster representatives.
Move to Virtual Meetings – Time is not our friend, so any way we can get back more time and still be very efficient with our meetings is a major plus to all involved with VA. Virtual meetings are one thing that the pandemic gave to us and they work well. I consider virtual meetings to be a best practice today. There is no need to gather all your team members in one conference room for a meeting any longer. Many of my clients use the virtual model and allow all team members to log in on Teams/Zoom which works well. Our studies have found that VA Team attendance is up by 26% in the virtual model which is a dramatic increase.
You can also move to a hybrid team model in which you keep your conference room meeting but then offer the login for the virtual team members.
Make Your Job Easier by Training Sales Reps – The VA Workflow Process needs Sales Reps’ pricing, evidence, information, etc., plus they need to assist your staff in filling out the new product request information (if they aren’t doing the filling out themselves). You have to remember that Sales Reps have to serve many hospitals and health systems that have many different types of forms, new product systems, and alike. This can make it very difficult on a representative to work with your organization, simply because they don’t know what they don’t know. If you think that new product requests are all the same or extremely similar at health systems in your region, think again. There is no way to handle your customized New Product Request Workflow in a standardized way.
This all leads us to the point that you need to create some sort of training, documentation, step-by-step instructions, or on-demand videos for your Reps to understand your VA Workflow so they can better help you and your teams. In the end, you are helping them, but you are going to be helping yourself because there will be no more missing information or the back and forth with the Reps to get all the right information for each new product request. Once you get this together, you can just update it once a year and it will solve so many issues with your VA Workflow.
These are the most impactful upgrades you can implement to significantly enhance your Value Analysis Workflow and make the process easier for everyone involved. The volume of new product requests isn’t going to slow down — if anything, it will continue to grow. With time, resources, and budget under more pressure than ever, now is the right time to consider adopting some (or all) of these improvements.
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