Health Future, LLC's Purchasing Program

Our Purchasing Program uses multiple experience-based Councils to identify and implement initiatives to help drive costs down in the delivery of health care. Our Council disciplines include CIO, Lab, Pharmacy, Periop and Supply Chain. We often host joint sessions with our Councils as initiatives cross over discipline lines. Our most recent successes have resulted in annualized savings in excess of $2.5M in chemistry/immunoassay and custom procedural tray contracts. We are in the midst of centralizing our IV products (including sets, solution and devices) and estimate a reduction in costs of about 12% (vs. increases in the 20-50% range) as well as an allocated supply in a market that has been challenged to maintain capacity to meet demands.

We are in the process of developing long-term strategic plans that will include more collaboration as a group and possible development of shared services across certain supply chain functions.

Implementation and Results

Our resources have been, for the most part, internal staff with analytic and implementation assistance from our GPO partner, MedAssets. Our Purchasing Program is fully funded by our owner/member organizations. We return all savings, administrative fees and other value-added benefits directly to our participating members.

Lessons Learned

As always, getting all members committed to a unified direction is difficult. In the chemistry/immunoassay and custom procedure tray initiatives we settled on a dual award result. The ability to drive competition and use good criteria for analysis was key in achieving savings under this scenario. For IV initiative we have decided to solidify a long-term strategic partnership with a sole source due to the volatility of that market.

Plans for future projects include cardiac rhythm management devices (pacers, generators, etc), adoption of dedicated connector protocols to prevent harm, a refresh on orthopedic joint and spine implants and due diligence surrounding possible shared services development.

For more information, contact:

Leslie Flick
Executive Director
Health Future LLC (Medford, OR)
541.891.1867
l-flick@healthfuture.org