5 minute read
Finding hidden value in the data
Mat Oram CEO and Co-founder of AdviseInc outlines how to improve procurement in hospital systems through the use of data
Procurement can sometimes be a painful experience for healthcare operators. Not knowing if you’re paying too much, or if you really need what you’re buying, or if it’s the right product for the job can make it tricky to navigate.
However, this isn’t to say all hope is lost. In the age of digital and technology, data can be connected unlike before, enabling operators to find value in areas that they did not know existed. The analysis of data, and use of data, especially at scale within procurement in healthcare, has been enormously beneficial, but the big question is, where do you begin?
AdviseInc has been helping healthcare organisations save money throughout the procurement process for years. Utilising our Price Benchmarking & Spend Analytics tools, AdviseInc has identified millions of pounds worth of variation in more than 200 NHS trusts across the UK, and, as such, has saved these organisations vast amounts of money simply through the usage of procurement data analysis. It doesn’t matter if an operator’s data is poor, or their systems are not connected, they can still benefit from our analysis.
Getting the best value
To get the best value, you must first know what you’re buying, your customer, have some form of leverage through volume, innovation, or relationship - and you have to really understand the market for the product that you are sourcing. However, for smaller
organisations, this isn’t necessarily possible, and for larger organisations, it’s sometimes di icult to understand what exactly everybody needs and wants.
In the UK, every hospital is responsible for buying their own products - and for a long time there’s been a real push to do things nationally, but there are now two extremes. Buying locally you don’t get the full economies of scale, and buying nationally, you’re too far away from the customer, so there can be a massive disconnect.
ICS’s are now having a profound impact on procurement at large across the NHS. By enabling organisations to pool together, smaller organisations can still maintain their independence and benefit from being part of a larger buying organisation.
Mat Oram CEO AdviseInc
However, there is no universality between these organisations, and the bigger the ICS grows, the more variation you will encounter between systems and data, and the trickier it becomes to figure out the most pressing needs, posing a di erent issue from a procurement perspective, but an equally di icult conundrum.
Nowadays groups of hospitals are coming together which means they are having to work together and source products together - this can be challenging, but we’re trying to solve that problem for them. One of the challenges to address is how to bring data together from a procurement perspective to allow somebody buying regionally to make the right decision.
The correct use of data
In the UK, a lot of the ICS’s now have a Procurement Director, but how are they making their decisions? How do they know what might be going on in 5 or 15 di erent organisations, and what those organisations need right now or where things could be improved? Without the right tools, that’s an impossible task.
The solution, of course, lies in the correct use of data. It isn’t as if these data systems don’t exist. Legacy ordering, finance, cataloguing and inventory systems all exist in UK organisations and have done for a long time, but they have never been brought together into a single view.
Users must log on to so many di erent systems, with so many di erent credentials and formats, user interfaces and methods of operating, that it’s painful and timeconsuming.
The only way for a leader at one of these organisations to make sense of it all is to have all the information in one place, providing them with opportunities, pricing, benchmarks, and current inventory.
The issue is even more pressing with systems which are not yet integrated. At the current time, more and more healthcare systems are rapidly adopting the ICS model, but the risk of doing this with legacy systems without properly collating, cleansing and normalising the data poses a gargantuan task and continues to leave many in the dark.
However, with AdviseInc’s analytical solutions, this no longer needs to be an issue, even if a company’s procurement data is outdated or not in the best shape. Using our tools, they can still identify key areas to save money without the need for a shiny new data system or months of improvement. Part of the beauty of our system is that it will tell you exactly where your data needs improving, and a lot of the time the data is fine for analysis. There’s always value in the data and we can always help find savings.
Furthermore, AdviseInc’s solution can be implemented rapidly, posing no risk to organisations looking to both improve their data and cut a vast amount of cost in the procurement process.
Once we receive that data and it’s in the right format, we can start our onboarding process internally. Usually within two weeks an organisation should have access to an application and they can see / analyse their data. Then we improve the quality as we go, but they would receive most of the benefit in terms of where they could save money within two or three weeks.
We have proved the concept at scale across the UK. In our first major project we onboarded our solution to more than 210 NHS trusts in the UK to deliver price benchmarking across the whole of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Within 3 months the system was fully operational for 90 per cent of NHS provider trusts. There was a monumental amount of data to tackle from every single NHS Trust system which we price benchmarked. With successful proof of concepts completed in the USA, Australia and parts of Europe, we’re now looking for more countries to benefit.
In short, our solutions are able to handle data which could be old and creaking yet still make it deliverable at scale, and above all, the process is incredibly fast. In our opinion, it’s a no brainer for organisations who want to improve their procurement process and need to save money with most of our customers seeing multiple returns on investment quickly.
