The healthcare industry has driven over $121 million in costs out of the supply chain through the NuVia℠ Content Management Solution since January 2010 when GHX began its "5 in 5"pledge to take $5 billion out of the cost of healthcare in five years. By implementing master data management strategies with NuVia at their core, healthcare providers in the U.S. and Canada have improved transactional and pricing accuracy, reduced overpayments and captured more accurate reimbursements.
While the item master should be the single source of truth for product and pricing data, most provider organizations struggle with inaccurate, outdated and erroneous information. One key reason is that even the most well-staffed and technologically equipped organizations cannot manually keep up with the overwhelming volume of healthcare data and the rate of change. It’s estimated that, each year, 10 million changes are made to medical-surgical products on the market in the U.S. The resulting item master errors have far-reaching impacts on the operational and financial performance of an organization, from overpayments caused by contract price discrepancies to lost revenue from missed reimbursements.
"The item master impacts practically every aspect of a hospital or health system’s clinical and business operations, from the patient care they provide to the revenue they generate,"said Rachel Hall, vice president, Product Management for GHX. "Healthcare professionals today are highly focused on prominent issues such as electronic medical records and value-based purchasing. Effective item master strategies – creating an item master that is the hospital’s source of truth – enables the data that drives all of these efforts and more. This is a critical factor in a healthcare organization’s long-term success."
The NuVia Content Management Solution virtually eliminates manual item master maintenance by synchronizing, cleansing and enriching an organization’s item master data with product and pricing information derived directly from medical-surgical manufacturers and group purchasing organizations. NuVia serves as a cloud-based virtual item master, monitoring an organization’s item master for changes and updates, and then correcting product data inaccuracies, removing duplicates and infilling missing information, such as manufacturer item numbers and units of measure (UOM), to help reduce transaction errors.
Within the first 12 months of using NuVia, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) avoided $1 million in costs stemming from inaccurate data and inefficient processes and secured $370,000 in savings related to contract and tier price compliance. Using NuVia, GHX assigned Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes to the products within MUSC’s item master, helping enable the organization to be reimbursed appropriately for products used in procedures. By integrating its item master with its charge master and providing users with easy access to detailed product descriptions, MUSC is driving greater accuracy in the billing process and in turn, helping to ensure it is receiving adequate reimbursement from The Centers for Medicare &Medicaid Services and other payers.
"We’ve seen an amazing difference with NuVia,"said Régine Honoré Villain, MPH, director of Supply Chain Management for MUSC. "By serving as the initiator of item master data, supply chain can now play a central role in revenue enhancing initiatives. It’s absolutely phenomenal."
At Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center (SFHMC), the supply chain team reduced non-file spend by 87 percent (from $33M to $4.3M) within 12 months of implementing NuVia. One way SFHMC achieved this was by working with GHX to standardize product descriptions using United Nations Standard Products and Services Codes® (UNSPSC®) and input from clinicians and nurses so clinical staff can easily find the products they need within the item master, which minimizes off-file purchases. Standardization by UNSPSC also enables SFHMC to analyze its spend by product type, class or category and determine which vendors it is purchasing from within each category.
"In today’s healthcare market where the business decisions we make are critical and every penny counts we can’t be making decisions based on junk data,"said David Walsh, administrative director, Supply Chain, Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center. "We’ve strengthened our organization’s data integrity by creating and maintaining our item master as our single source of truth that feeds everything else."
About GHX
Global Healthcare Exchange, LLC (GHX) is driving costs out of healthcare by transforming the healthcare supply chain. Working with providers and suppliers, GHX is accelerating change by providing a faster, more efficient and collaborative supply chain that will take billions of dollars out of the cost of healthcare for North America. For more information, visit www.ghx.com and The Healthcare Hub