What do you want a President of a health system to say during a kickoff meeting for their shiny new system-wide Value Analysis Program that you helped them to strategically plan, train, and implement? You painstakingly worked to give them a state-of-the-art Value Analysis Program and wanted the President to come in and let them know how important this VA Program was to their costs and quality at their health system, but instead, one question threw this off.
After the President made his speech, a Department Director asked, “We now have Lean and Value Analysis. If there was a conflict between the two, which should we work on?” Unfortunately, the President shot from the hip and told them, “Lean should be worked on first, not Value Analysis.” The correct answer that the President should have given was, “Both!” Priorities matter, but they don’t have to conflict.
Nothing Should Be Pushed Aside
There really should be no prioritizing anything in Value Analysis. Everything is just as important as any one of the modalities in Value Analysis. New product requests, recalls, and utilization (removing waste and inefficiencies for savings) are vitally important to your health system’s wellbeing.
Prioritizing in the Value Analysis world is very challenging, yet there is only so much time in the day, week, month, or year to gain quality results. Normally, you get into rushes in one area, like new product requests, and then the next thing you know, your CFO wants more savings, so you swing into saving money mode, all while getting hit with a few recalls in the same timeframe. VA is a multifaceted job, to say the least, and not everything can be a priority all at once, right? Or can it?
The push and pull in VA are an ongoing game just about every Value Analysis professional plays to keep the fine balance in the name of their clinical customers as well as their senior-level leadership. In healthcare, those customers and stakeholders want what they want, and they want it all, but for a Value Analysis practitioner to deliver time in and time out is the real challenge. Normally, what happens is things fall through the cracks.
New Product Requests — Normally, these tend to get prioritized to the top of your list quite quickly, especially when you get an influential physician who is not afraid to flex their muscle with your C-Suite to move things along. This happens everywhere. There are a few keys to think about: look at the timeframes you give to processing the new product requests, as well as take a realistic look at how long these NPRs are taking you and your team to move from start to finish. Whatever the average time is, it should be your timeframe for getting these done, and then it needs to be communicated to your clinicians that this is the expectation.
Recalls — Recalls don’t wait for a convenient week on your calendar, and that’s exactly why they can’t be treated as a “when we get to it” item. A missed or delayed recall response isn’t just an inefficiency; it’s a direct patient safety exposure and a liability risk for the health system. The fix isn’t to drop everything every time a recall notice lands in your inbox; it’s to build a standing process so recalls don’t have to compete for your attention in the first place. That means a defined intake point (who receives recall notices and from where), a triage step (is this a Class I, II, or III, and does it touch products currently in use, in stock, or already implanted?), and a documented turnaround expectation for each tier. When recalls run on their own track with clear ownership, they stop feeling like emergencies that derail your new product queue or your savings work, and they become just another lane running in parallel.
Clinical Supply Utilization — Reducing waste and inefficiency for major savings. This is the modality that most often gets pushed to “later” because it doesn’t come with a physician champion pushing it forward or a regulatory deadline forcing your hand. Nobody is calling your VA office in a panic because a supply cart has too much unused inventory sitting on the shelf. But utilization work is where a lot of the quiet, compounding savings live: standardization opportunities, par-level corrections, reducing product variation across service lines, and catching contract compliance gaps. The challenge is that this work is easy to defer precisely because it isn’t loud. If you don’t protect dedicated time for it, it simply won’t happen, and the savings your CFO is counting on for the year will fall short, even though your team has been busy the entire time.
So, Which One Is Most Important?
The honest answer is none of them, and all of them. New product requests keep innovation and physician relationships moving. Recalls protect patients and shield the organization from risk. Utilization work protects the financial health of the system that makes everything else possible. Pit them against each other, and you’ll always be shortchanging one in favor of another, and eventually leadership, staff, or patients will feel the gap.
The better move is structural, not preferential. Give each modality its own lane, its own defined process, its own realistic turnaround expectations, and its own protected time on the calendar. When a Department Director asks, “Which one should we work on first?” the answer isn’t a ranking. It’s a system built well enough that the question never has to force a trade-off in the first place.
Because the moment your VA Program starts operating like it can only handle one thing at a time, that’s the moment it stops being a system-wide program and starts being a fire department — always reacting, never getting ahead.
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