5 minute read
Operating in the shadows
Procurement Spend Analytics is critical to hospitals realising maximum value, Mat Oram CEO of AdviseInc tells Sarah Cartledge
Helping suppliers get the best products into the market is a simple concept but one that is not necessarily at play in the UK healthcare sphere. Many hospital groups still procure independently, from one
NHS organisation to another, leading to disparity of pricing and o en overspending.
Within the NHS, which has more than 220 provider trusts, the price gaps can seem incomprehensible to those outside the system, but fortunately there is help at hand.
AdviseInc is a small but dynamic health tech company that sees its goal as helping healthcare organisations make sense of their spend data, thus saving money. They achieve this by connecting product knowledge with Artificial Intelligence and analysing millions of rows of line level purchasing data to identify discrepancies and anomalies, resulting in huge savings for the hospitals that consult them. Once clients understand the value in their data, they continue to use AdviseInc to analyse an ever-increasing data set and drive more insight.
For CEO Mat Oram, this is the optimum result. Five years ago the company was delivering a national price benchmarking tool to every NHS trust in England until NHS Digital brought the service in-house more recently. Now Mat and his team work directly with many countries and hospitals including NHS Wales, Health and Social Care Northern Ireland, Guy’s and St Thomas’s and Integrated Care Systems,
including Bath & Wiltshire and Cheshire & Merseyside to impact the bottom line – more than 70 NHS organisations & growing.
“We operate in the shadows and few people outside the procurement and finance teams know we exist,” says Mat. “The better teams will introduce us to the wider hospital team, including clinicians, so we can produce the optimum result for them, but a number of teams don’t always know who their clinicians are, and we o en end up making the introductions ourselves.
“Once we explain the benefits of our analytics to the surgical and healthcare teams, they can understand how their choices drive variation and how they can reduce it to save money. O en, they use more expensive equipment out of habit, or because they have been sold it when they didn’t need it. We came across one case where a particular surgeon insisted on continuing to use a certain brand of orthopaedic implant because he had always used it, and he cost the hospital £0.25m extra a year as a result.”
Pulling together the data sets
Currently AdviseInc manages a number of di erent procurement applications. Now they are developing a single structure called Control Tower to aid procurement managers who run many teams in di erent hospitals. “It will give regional and trust leadership all the KPIs and the information they need to stay in control of their region. At the moment there are many varied data sets so we’re starting to pull them all together to drive these KPIs in one place,” says Mat.
Control Tower is planned to launch in Q2 of 2022. “Our applications have grown organically over the years and they are o en bespoke to a particular need or pain point for a procurement team. Now they will be under one framework, which is going to have a new look and feel and will be consistent regardless of which modules a customer wants to buy into,” he says.
But pulling together the data is just the start. The process then relies on the internal teams to look at the data and work out where the savings can be made. Sometimes other factors come into play and it’s not possible to make the changes, but o en the investigations yield positive results. “We really need the hospital concerned to engage because we can only do so much with the analysis,” says Mat. “In general, the NHS really needs to invest more in analytical capability within procurement teams and upskill sta regarding data literacy to get the most out of our tools and analytics.
“Aortic valves are a good example, with one hospital being shown why they’re an outlier in terms of the products they work with. From a price point of view they were getting a good price compared to peers, but were buying the platinum version of the product. A er studying the brand and product variation analysis, we showed them how many high-tech (high cost) products they were using versus the rest of the country who all used a great percentage of low-tech (low cost) products. For a specialist hospital this may be the case, but not for all.”
Mat Oram CEO AdviseInc
Value-based procurement
By analysing the data and price benchmarking, Mat estimates the NHS could save between £70m and £300m each year. For him, the most successful and sustainable route is value-based procurement. “Initially suppliers saw us as a threat with our price benchmarking, uncovering the di erent prices they charged to clients,” he states.
“Now many suppliers understand that if they can demonstrate reductions in patient stay in hospital or a better patient outcome, we can actually back this up with the data to demonstrate overall value and not just the lowest price. If we can introduce hospitals to di erent suppliers to save money in this way, then we do so.” In addition, Mat and his team can help overseas suppliers understand the best approach to the NHS, having worked in it for over 17 years.
The entry point for most overseas work for AdviseInc is in product price benchmarking service, which is simple for the client to understand and delivers the most value quickly. It’s most successful within hospital groups who could be looking to understand how to save money across multiple sites.
Most companies start on a small scale with Mat’s team to prove the concept. “Once we’ve taken them on the journey and proved the solutions pay for themselves quickly, we’re then asked what else we can do. Because we can connect the data like no one else in the market, we’re able to release more value than traditional, basic spend analysis and benchmarking.”
Contact Information
support@adviseinc.co.uk
