Author: John Young, M.D., MBA, FACHE, Chief Medical Officer, HealthTrust Performance Group
In a landscape filled with uncertainties—economic challenges, inflationary pressures, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages—healthcare providers are navigating multiple obstacles in their pursuit to provide quality patient care. In addition, healthcare providers are also charged with creating value within their organizations, making it critical for them to work alongside experts who understand their unique needs and know how to optimize performance.
At HealthTrust Performance Group, we solve the challenges healthcare systems face by combining our operator expertise with the power of an aligned purchasing model. We define this operator expertise as HealthTrust’s “operator advantage.” Since our inception in 1999 as a provider-owned and operated GPO, we have evolved into a total performance improvement organization. We share the same goals as our members and we develop solutions with a different perspective than others in the industry. Our “operator advantage” helps deliver proven results for healthcare providers across the country, regardless of their size, affiliation or ownership structure.
Driving Value Through an Operator Advantage
HealthTrust embodies a legacy of operational experience, with many of our experts coming from real-world operator and provider settings. This means that we are different and that we innately understand and anticipate the challenges healthcare providers face. Our diverse team of experts can approach the issues from varying perspectives to improve performance across expense management, labor, purchased services, pharmacy and overall clinical and operational performance.
As an example, HealthTrust’s product standardization programming successfully engages clinicians and offers more than just supply chain contracting. By embedding our team of clinical and supply chain experts alongside our members to address operational inefficiencies we have achieved millions of dollars in cost savings without compromising on quality patient care. This includes everything from large-scale operational adjustments to small but impactful changes, such as swapping 10 cc osteobiologic syringes with 3 cc syringes in specialized ORs, which led to nearly $2 million in annualized savings.
Informing Routine & Complex Decision-Making
As a testament to being a provider and sharing the same goals as our members, HealthTrust is focused on the mission of each health system by delivering the utmost value and supporting operational excellence. This spans across the business—regardless of where the need exists, i.e., inventory management, standardization initiatives, pharmacy operations optimization or establishing a value analysis process across their service lines. Such work is validated with evidence and data. We consistently engage our Physician Advisors and technology partners to ensure members have the evidence, research, data and benchmarks for informed decision-making.
A core tenet of executing HealthTrust’s operator advantage includes decision-making that is informed by experts who understand the operational and clinical requirements to effectively manage a healthcare facility. All contracting decisions put patients at the center and are guided by clinical leaders and member-led advisory boards. This ensures there is alignment and accountability in contracting for the highest quality of products at industry-leading prices from our supplier partners. Advisory board members are hands-on, facility-level representatives with expertise in both clinical and non-clinical areas.
Mitigating Expertise Gaps in Healthcare
Beyond the broader complexities in the industry, healthcare providers also encounter numerous operational challenges—from managing a wide variety of product stock-keeping units (SKUs) within a category, to determining proper staffing needs and plans.
As is the case in a number of disciplines within healthcare, there is also a major gap in subject matter expertise across the supply chain. Currently, we are seeing leaders in materials management across health systems retire, with a lack of skilled talent available to backfill. Valuable information ordinarily passed down to successors during a transition gets lost, widening the knowledge gap. This particular gap hinders providers’ ability to efficiently manage and distribute critical resources, which can lead to delays in patient care and increased operational costs.
We demonstrate our operator advantage through a range of subject matter experts who support all areas of performance across hospital operations—from cost management, physician engagement and custom contracting to supply chain optimization, labor management and clinical integration of a systemwide supply chain. This, combined with HealthTrust’s proprietary database of more than 1,000 demonstrated best practices, provides the expertise that enables healthcare providers to efficiently manage day-to-day operational and industry challenges so their staff can stay focused on quality patient care.
For 25 years, hospitals and health systems across the country have delivered value to their organizations by leveraging the operator experience only HealthTrust can provide. Visit HealthTrustPG.com to learn more about putting our operator experience to work for your organization.
