GHX and SCL Health System, a faith-based, not-for-profit health care organization based in Denver, confronted the challenge of declining reimbursements in healthcare by addressing the conversion from manual to automated processes in the operating room and the importance of contract and price synchronization at the recent Implantable Device Supply Chain Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting.
The July 19 SIG focused on best practices for contract synchronization around price, catalog number, effective date and timing, and price modifiers, and was part of a series of quarterly events hosted by GHX and based on work being done with the Implantable Device Advisory Board (IAB) Workgroups. A recording of the event is available here (July 19 SIG). IAB Workgroup recommendations presented at the SIG included:
Presenting at the SIG was Calvin Beasley, Operations Manager at SCL Health System, a $2.2 billion nonprofit health network, that operates nine hospitals, four safety net clinics, one children’s mental health center and more than 100 ambulatory service centers in four states – Colorado, Kansas, Montana and California.
“It’s our job to harness the latest technologies to support our health ministries by ensuring that vital medical supplies and implantable devices are ready and available when our clinicians need them,”said Beasley. “We wanted a solution that offers a great degree of transparency between our partners and our supply chain team, so that collectively, we can provide the best possible outcomes for our patients with the greatest degree of cost savings.”
SCLHS is one of the pilot organizations deploying GHX Case XpertSM, the first-of-its-kind solution to capture and share data from case creation to product usage during procedures, creating usage capture capability while validating that the device is on contract for more accurate billing, purchasing and inventory tracking.
Benefits seen in pilot site usage include improved charge capture resulting in less revenue leakage;increase in on-contract spending;decrease in contract overpayment via increase in real-time pricing;increased access to early pay discounts;reduction in documentation errors, case-to-bill cycle time as well as time spent on dispute resolution.
“As we work with Case Xpert pilot provider sites, we see that they’re looking for a single way of managing price for all of their implants, working to simplify their processes, and seeking an electronic format to make it easier to manage their implantable device supply chain as a whole,”said Ed Shappell, director, Service Delivery at GHX.
A software-as-a-service application, Case Xpert is formed around a core set of integration and intelligent routing capabilities that is available to trading partners in a cloud-based environment. The solution enables providers and manufacturers to initiate implantable device cases and track them through audit and completion using agreed upon item and price information maintained in Case Xpert. It also provides the ability to transport orders for Physician Preference Items (PPI) via the GHX Exchange and automate the review and validation of the information on the order. Case Xpert was designed and built with HIPAA and security in mind.
Case Xpert, along with Order Intelligence, are the first of the GHX solutions designed to address the estimated $5 billion in revenue losses currently recorded every year by healthcare providers and manufacturers due to the lack of automation and process efficiency for these devices, which represent a $40 billion market segment.
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 more information, visit www.ghx.com and The Healthcare Hub.