Why now is the time to automate your implant orders

“I would say that we were the driver in helping our teams understand what was possible. That would be one thing we had to continuously do and would say to all of you as well. This is possible. It can be done.”  Jack Koczela, Froedtert Health, Director of Supply Chain Services

Health systems and their suppliers have long looked for ways to simplify implant orders to reduce costs, save time, improve contract and invoice accuracy, and provide better patient care by making sure the right implants are available.

During the 2022 GHX Summit Automating Bill-Only Implant Orders panel presentation, supply chain leaders from three U.S. health systems, Froedtert Health, Mount Sinai Health System and Stanford Health Care, explained to attendees why the time to automate implant orders is now and shared their stories on how they did it.

The Path to the "Perfect Order"

In healthcare, the long-held view of a “perfect order” is one where a purchase order is processed electronically — from order to payment — without human intervention.

Achieving the perfect order hasn’t been easy. A lack of automation throughout the payment cycle created all kinds of barriers to achieving the perfect order. 

Influence Supply Chain Performance with Automation and Order Accuracy

How can you significantly influence your supply chain performance without the help of additional resources?

Healthcare provider organizations are tasked with this dilemma daily and the goal to go beyond just managing costs, but to actually reduce costs while improving patient outcomes. Supply chain specifically goes after this challenge with an eye toward expanding automation, using data proactively and improving contract price alignment.

GHX Supplier Community Growing Beyond Med Surg

• Denise Odenkirk, Vice President, Supplier Sales

In the olden days (think any time before 2010), the healthcare suppliers getting connected to the GHX exchange were pretty much medical-surgical manufacturers and distributors.  And while the supplier community connected to GHX, and the provider community as well, continued to grow, the products that were being purchased electronically through GHX tended to be those we classify as disposables and consumables.  Maybe it was just that healthcare needed a starting point to think about where and how to automate purchasing, and the area of a hospital most able to move toward e-procurement was the department formerly known as materials management.

Suppliers Share Best Practices in Order Management

• Denise Odenkirk, Vice President, Supplier Sales

At the 2014 GHX Healthcare Supply Chain Summit, representatives from four leading supplier organizations shared their lessons learned and best practices for using GHX Order Intelligence^SM to address purchase order (PO) issues during the transactional process—before the PO hits their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, thereby eliminating costly errors and rework. All presenters agreed that setting up a clearly defined set of business rules was key to improving order accuracy and process efficiency. 

A Little Empowerment Goes a Long Way Toward Efficiency

Talia Mauck, director of Supply Chain Management for Adventist HealthCare

So much of healthcare today is about centralization with organizations seeking to increase efficiency and reduce costs. At Adventist HealthCare we’ve found that decentralizing purchasing information by providing key clinical departments access to order status has enabled us to achieve these same benefits.

Bring Simplicity to Healthcare: Let’s Start With One Map to All Trading Partners

• Denise Odenkirk, Vice President, Supplier Sales

In healthcare, we have a history of complexity that drives some of the current costs of healthcare.  Bringing a new, innovative device or drug to market is an incredibly long, complex and costly process. Now add onto that our incredibly complex supply chain processes, which require the distribution of goods and services across a variety of points of care.

Snow again… Are You Digging Out of a Pile of Faxes?

• Denise Odenkirk, Vice President, Supplier Sales

Winter has been tough this year. It has been especially tough on customer service departments.

Why?