Last August, Livonia, Michigan-based Trinity Health became the first recipient of the HealthTrust Innovation Grant, awarded to the 86-hospital system for its work in developing a Web-based, enterprisewide business intelligence platform that has already driven $10 million in savings. It was an impressive number, but nowhere near the ultimate goal of the multidisciplinary team that developed the tool, which pulls data from a mix of sources—including point-of-care materials management and decision support systems—to help Trinity Health identify variation, overutilization and product waste.

A year later, we’re checking in with Trinity Health to see how the grant, which provided a $25,000 cash award and another $25,000 in HealthTrust service line support, has allowed it to move even closer to a clinically integrated supply chain operation.

The platform comprises two different dashboards. The first one reports on volume, cost, waste, revisions, reimbursement and supplier market share specific to orthopedic joint and spine implants. The second dashboard, dubbed the Value Analysis Supply Utilization Tool, categorizes spend data on thousands of products by UNSPSC (United Nations Standards Products and Services Code) and then normalizes them using a selection of 25 diverse financial indicators, including average daily census, acute staffed beds, total surgeries and equivalent discharges. Both dashboards update automatically each month and feature visualization tools such as heat maps to help users quickly identify problem areas and trending tools to help them track progress. Together, these tools give service line leaders timely information about product spend and utilization, and allow supply chain personnel to identify potential areas of opportunity for cost savings and standardization.

A Globe in Hand…

Trinity Health’s platform recently alerted one of its hospitals that it was in the red zone for glove usage. Curious, department heads took a closer look to figure out why. They discovered that when a clinician would try to pull one glove out of a box, multiple gloves would follow and fall on the floor, becoming waste.

“They came up with a creative solution for the problem,” Farkas says. “They fashioned a glove saver—a clear acrylic contraption placed over the box with small holes for pulling out one glove at a time. It’s a simple yet ingenious solution that saves the hospital money on one of its most-used products. And it all started because of the analytics tool.”

These opportunities couldn’t be identified without an accurate and thorough classification of products. From the beginning, Scott Gasiorek, informatics director of Supply Chain and Fixed Assets Management, and his core team—including Lynne Farkas, director of Value Analysis, and Kelley Young, director of Strategic Sourcing for Cardiovascular, Orthopedic and Spine—understood the importance of data classification and the role it would play in producing more precise analysis, but they were challenged by a lack of resources and specific expertise.

Through the HealthTrust Innovation Grant, Gasiorek’s team is partnering with the third-party data cleansing service AcuteLogics, which is helping categorize products by UNSPSC and further by product attributes such as size, length, diameter, strength and material. As part of the grant, HealthTrust also is providing project management support with AcuteLogics, which Gasiorek says has helped keep his team on task as it creates a framework to support ongoing data classification.

“We were really challenged because we had two large databases that were built separately,” he says. “It has been valuable to engage folks who just do data and have that set of eyes and experience and can do cross-reference cleansings and spec identification.”

Not only has the three-way partnership allowed Trinity Health to improve the accuracy of its data, it has also boosted the team’s efficiency. “We don’t have to do as much backtracking, so they’ve helped us become more productive as well,” Farkas says. “They expedite the work that we do.”

AcuteLogics helped Trinity Health identify a product used in general urology that was being misrepresented. “We had an item with a common manufacturer, but different suppliers put dashes in different places,” Farkas explains. “That made it challenging to figure out how to compare products. With AcuteLogics’ assistance, we were able to normalize the description and manufacturer number, helping us to capture all the spend.”

The team says better classified data has also allowed them to talk strategically with both clinicians and suppliers.

A more thorough classification of peripheral balloons, which were historically classified as either “standard” or “specialty,” helped Trinity Health save $464,000 on $2.6 million in spend last year. This was achieved by determining a matrix sourcing strategy to achieve additional value from suppliers based on the key attributes of length, diameter and high pressure capacity.

Young notes, “Over time, most of our hospitals have come to recognize the tool as ‘a compass, not a GPS,’ as Lynne likes to say. It helps us find positive ways to improve. Our people are asked to find cost savings every day of their lives, but it isn’t always easy. Now, they have a way and mechanism to find that savings.”

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