Renewed Freight Management & Merchant Services

Members save with two key contracts

HealthTrust members can look forward to continued savings and quality services with two recently renewed key contracts in the commercial products portfolio: freight management and merchant acquiring services.

Shipping the savings

Members can use the inbound and outbound freight program through OptiFreight Logistics (HealthTrust Contract #2101), a Cardinal Health service. The service also optimizes the outbound shipping mode to improve costs while still receiving shipments in time. Members can also choose OptiFreight services only for inbound shipments. A HealthTrust FedEx agreement, Contract #1354, allows members to manage their outbound shipments if they prefer. These negotiated direct rates with FedEx are lower than members can get on their own.

“In freight management, there is a lot of value achieved at the individual member level and additional savings as the overall HealthTrust volume increases,” says Kim Allen, AVP, Strategic Sourcing Commercial Products, HealthTrust. “The goal of the program is to move unmanaged freight.”

For example, a health system buying knee transplant products can pay for shipping using the vendor’s service or provide the OptiFreight account number under the HealthTrust agreement. “We have negotiated freight rates, and when they ship items under our account number, it reduces costs for the health system by managing spend and ensuring the member is getting the lowest rates while meeting service needs of that particular shipment,” Allen says.

Managing freight on a member level can be costly. In addition to pricing differences, members must match invoices to shipments, which requires buying specialized software and hiring additional labor. This, in turn, makes determining the total cost of each product more difficult.

Cardinal Health can provide each HealthTrust member with a statement showing the savings from using the managed shipping service. With OptiFreight, members also have visibility into package tracking for near real-time location information. Other included services are data insights and insurance claims handling for damaged or late shipments.

When adopting OptiFreight logistics, the implementation team includes a project lead, project specialist, IT specialist and account manager. Members also receive essential education to maximize the program’s use within its healthcare organization, including choice of the best shipping methods based on need and cost.

Merchant services agreements

HealthTrust recently renewed a merchant services agreement with the global financial technology payments company Fiserv (HealthTrust Contract #46091). This contract covers inbound payment processing, such as those made at doctors’ offices, the hospital gift shop and cafeteria—any site using a payment terminal. Because it works directly with the processor, the service saves money for HealthTrust members.

A critical benefit is that Fiserv provides Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance for fraud risk. This ensures that the health system’s processes are followed to dramatically reduce the risk of a data breach when processing payments. Hiring consultants to perform this compliance service would be expensive, but there is no cost to members when they utilize Fiserve.

Merchant service agreements can only be changed when the current contracts expire. Due to government rules, contracts must auto-renew, so health systems should know their current agreement terms and those interested in changing should begin the transition process well before that renewal.

“You can never start working on a transition too far in advance,” Allen says, even if the agreement renewal is two years in the future. The compliance and transition process involves every point of service (POS) terminal, every doctor’s office and every site in the hospital or medical center with a swipe machine. “Fiserv will support analyzing all of it to ensure compliance,” she says. HealthTrust can also run a savings analysis for members, so they understand the savings at stake.

Learn more about these programs and the savings your organization can gain from them by visiting the Commercial Portfolio section of the HealthTrust Member Portal or by emailing commercial@healthtrustpg.com.