Utilization Management Starting Your Own Clinical Supply Utilization Management Program

By Robert W. Yokl, Sr. VP, Supply Chain & Value Analysis SVAH Solutions

There is Power in Knowing Where You Stand on Every Category

I recently had a sales call with a hospital Director who was interested in starting a Clinical Supply Utilization Management (CSUM) program at his hospital. His reasons were that they had been doing as much as possible with GPO/contract price and standardization but that they were doing nothing about clinical supply utilization. Being new to the CSUM space, he thought that he could start small and benchmark something like the top 10-20 categories and go from there and asked if that was realistic. My answer was that I wish it was, but it wasn’t.

With our now over 20+ years of benchmarking hospitals, the answer to that question is that every hospital is different. Every category at every hospital is the same but they are all different in how they use them and how good they are with their clinical supply utilization of these categories. So, I could not just go in and benchmark 10-20 of what I felt were the top categories as it would have just been a guess. That is why our firm always benchmarks the entire organization (fiscal compare, cohort compare, historical compare, etc.) to truly see which categories need to be addressed and why. Understandably, I could not just benchmark the top 20 as they may have been good on just about all the top categories that I chose out of the over 700 major supply categories that a hospital purchases.