Contract Data for the Win

HealthTrust’s data team revitalizes contract management for Orlando Health

While Microsoft’s Excel was a game-changer for supply chain contract management when it was released nearly 40 years ago, today’s rapidly evolving supply chain necessitates a much more sophisticated approach. That’s why Orlando Health, one of the largest health systems in Florida, turned to HealthTrust.

Corey Trautman joined Orlando Health as Senior Director of Data Integrity & Innovation in January 2022 and soon realized that the health system needed to update the entire master contract system.

At the time, there was no central repository for contracts. An analyst had to gather details about contracts from HealthTrust’s database, access local contracts from a third-party supplier every two weeks and then update the master contract file in Excel. The process took 34 hours. “There were just so many manual steps, and with endless tasks to complete, there was no way it would ever be accurate. By the time it was done, the master file was already outdated,” Trautman says.

Streamlining pricing

In addition to wanting a more accurate and less onerous process to manage contracts, Orlando Health sought a simple way to figure out pricing, identify types of contracts and determine if suppliers were charging the correct prices. “We needed to find a solution that could answer those questions and allow us to have up-to-date contract data at our fingertips,” Trautman explains.

What Orlando Health needed was a virtual master contract dashboard, and to get it, the health system turned to HealthTrust, its own IT team and Orlando Health’s citizen developer team. “If we had to go through a formal IT process to build it alone, it would have taken much longer. The HealthTrust data team is amazing,” Trautman says. “They delivered everything we asked for and then some.”

Using Power BI, Microsoft’s data visualization software, the partners created a virtual contract master that automates HealthTrust’s daily data feeds. It also aggregates Orlando Health’s GPO and local contracts and includes important attributes such as supplier part numbers, contract start and end dates, expiration alerts, corporate and multi-tier pricing, and more. “We have an 84% match on supplier part numbers, and we’re working with HealthTrust to get to 100%,” Trautman says.

Simplifying supplier approval

HealthTrust worked with Orlando Health to create a digital workflow to ensure the hospital system is always operating with the most current and complete contract and price information available. The Orlando Health Supply Chain Data Integrity and Innovation team then built a contract workflow app that connects to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The app enables the Orlando Health sourcing team to streamline the supplier approval process and to know at a glance who the active suppliers are. “As soon as we have a signed contract and it’s active, it now ‘magically’ appears on the dashboard,” Trautman shares.

In addition to having a user-friendly, systemwide repository for all contract data, other benefits include:

The elimination of a time-consuming manual process
Easily identifiable contract types
Visibility into contracted items, associated pricing & price discrepancies

With the proven effectiveness of the virtual master contract dashboard, Orlando Health is looking to what it can do next. Future enhancements, Trautman says, are “the fun stuff.” The tool has the potential to allow healthcare organizations to:

Achieve marketplace excellence through contract & item enrichment
Become ERP agnostic
Quickly identify contract compliance on par & inventory
Add case & physician preference card contract compliance
Leverage data for strategic sourcing initiatives
Question & monitor changes in contracted items
Automate tier optimization

A review of the supply chain data showed a 50% reduction in price discrepancies and other savings as well, freeing up resources for higher-value tasks. “We have all kinds of insight,” notes Trautman. “There are just so many different things you can do once you have the data.”

For more information, contact your HealthTrust Account Manager or visit healthtrustpg.com/contact-us/learn-more.