Each year, HealthTrust selects individuals or teams in five categories for its prestigious Member Recognition Awards. This year’s recipients set and achieved ambitious goals in many areas, from significant cost savings and operational advancements to innovative sustainability achievements and cutting-edge technological developments. We congratulate these winners and appreciate their work toward improvements around cost savings, quality improvement and patient outcomes.
Outstanding Member Award
Beaumont Health | Southfield, Michigan
Beaumont Health, an eight-hospital system in metro Detroit, joined HealthTrust in the spring of 2018. Right from the start, it set two big goals: 1. Achieve a two-year savings target of $28 million, and 2. Become one of the top contract-compliant systems with HealthTrust. Not only did the system hit its savings goal 90 days early, but it saved a total of $31.8 million.
“These were lofty goals, but we hit and exceeded both of our runways ahead of schedule,” says Melanie Fisher, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain at Beaumont Health.
Beaumont Health went above and beyond in other areas, too. In 2019 alone, it changed distributors; moved its 125,000-square-foot consolidated service center in two days; established a new physical inventory policy, process and playbook; and upgraded its PeopleSoft system.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the health system wasn’t deterred. At one point, Beaumont Health covered 70% of the COVID-19 positive cases in Michigan, Fisher says. It hit the ground running by staffing corporate and local emergency operations centers, sourcing supplies from the nearby automotive industry and onboarding new personal protective equipment (PPE) suppliers.
Fisher believes this Member Recognition Award is a step toward engaging and elevating supply chain through the enterprise. “It gave us an opportunity to showcase what we do, which in its simplest terms is getting the right product to the right place at the right time at the right price,” she adds.
Team Members (from left to right)
Timothy Essenmacher, MBA, CMRP, Director, Supply Chain; Brett Whitbread, MBA, Senior Director, VAT; Melanie Fisher, Senior Vice President, Supply Chain; Thomas Chickerella, Regional CEO, Supply Services, HealthTrust; Danish Abbasi, Director, Analytics
Operational Excellence Award
Prime Healthcare | Ontario, California
Prime Healthcare, a health system comprising 46 hospitals in 14 states, set a goal in 2018 to streamline supply chain operations and maximize contract savings—with an emphasis on purchased services—across all hospitals.
To support hospitals in achieving this goal, it created a corporate Value Analysis Team. It sent out conversion execution packages to each member hospital that included clear guidelines on which categories to convert and the underlying effort required to do so.
The packages included SKUs specific to each hospital, with vendor and item numbers already on the Maintenance Management Information System (MMIS), ensuring that once the facility was ready to switch products, the new items were already available to order. The conversion package also included an implementation checklist.
Corporate analysts provided weekly, and often daily, support to sites to help them be successful, says Ramesh Krish, Vice President of Supply Chain at Prime Healthcare.
The results were significant. Prime Healthcare achieved first-year savings of $4.3 million on a spend of $22 million. Contract compliance in converted categories was 90%, and implementation time improved from an average of six months to three months.
Krish says the key to Prime Healthcare’s success has been teamwork, including the corporate analyst team, local and regional materials management directors and staff, clinicians, OR and cath lab staff, infection control and nursing, with sponsorship from executive management to carry out the mandate. “If you have a good plan for what you want to implement, and you can lead and empower your team, the results will speak for themselves,” he adds.
Team members (from left to right)
Ravi Alla, Executive Vice President, Shared Services; Ramesh Krish, Vice President, Supply Chain; Horacio Vasquez, Corporate Director, Supply Chain Operations; Ronald Kwan, Corporate Director, Sourcing & Value Analysis; Anupriya Thukral, Corporate Associate Director, Supply Chain
Clinical Excellence Award
Clinical Operations Group, HCA Healthcare | Nashville, Tennessee
HCA Healthcare, a Nashville, Tennessee-based health system with 186 hospitals, won the 2020 Clinical Excellence Award for its work creating Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy (SPOT), a program aimed at the early detection of sepsis, a life-threatening response to infection—helping save an estimated 8,000 lives.
Each year, nearly 270,000 Americans die from sepsis. Traditionally, diagnosis has relied on manual screening by healthcare providers, often resulting in delayed detection.
Jonathan B. Perlin, M.D., Ph.D., MSHA, MACP, FACMI, Chief Medical Officer and President of the Clinical Operations Group at HCA Healthcare, says a traditional approach to stopping severe sepsis is similar to stopping a fire when the fire is already visibly raging. “What we wanted was a smoke detector for sepsis,” Dr. Perlin says.
HCA Healthcare created its SPOT technology and workflow using data science to analyze patterns of sepsis development across its hospitals. SPOT monitors electronic medical record (EMR) data and can detect signs of sepsis six hours earlier than even the best clinicians, Dr. Perlin says, which is crucial since mortality risk increases 4% to 7% for every hour of delayed diagnosis.
HCA Healthcare began its sepsis intervention efforts in 2013 and saw consecutive 10% reductions in mortality year overyear from 2013 to 2017. SPOT was deployed to 173 hospitals in 2018. HCA Healthcare saw a 23% reduction in sepsis mortality from 2017 to 2018.
The healthcare system’s scale has been crucial to the team’s success. “With the privilege of 37 million annual patient encounters across 2,200 sites of care, we had the opportunity to leverage scaled data to accelerate discovery and improvement,” Dr. Perlin adds.
Team members (from left to right):
Jonathan B. Perlin, M.D., Ph.D., MSHA, MACP, FACMI, Chief Medical Officer & President, Clinical Operations Group; Jeffrey Guy, M.D., MS, MMHC, FACS, Vice President, Care Process Design; Edmund Jackson, Ph.D., Chief Data Officer & Chief Data Scientist; JR Allen, Assistant Vice President, Data Science; Cody Hall, Director, Engineering; Adam Mindick, Director, Care Excellence
Social Stewardship Award
Overlook Medical Center, Atlantic Health System | Summit, New Jersey
Overlook Medical Center, a 504-bed hospital specializing in neuroscience care, is part of New Jersey-based Atlantic Health System. The hospital was given the 2020 Social Stewardship Award for reducing its environmental footprint in 2019 by instituting a program by which surgical blue wrap is repurposed into tote bags for patients and the hospital gift shop.
The initiative was led by Tami Ochs, RN, a nurse interested in sewing who created patterns for both large and small tote bags. Overlook Medical Center estimates they’re saving around 15,000 pounds of blue wrap from entering landfills each year, which translates to a savings of around $30,000 per year, by using blue wrap bags as patient-belonging bags.
Melissa Bonassisa, Medical Imaging Supervisor for the Ultrasound Department at Overlook Medical Center and Co-chair of the hospital’s Green Team, says creativity and a system-wide adoption of sustainability efforts were key to winning this award.
“Healthcare and sustainability initiatives do not always go hand in hand,” she says. “The infection prevention principles that are key to safely operating a hospital are often in direct opposition to the sustainable philosophy of reusing products. That’s why success is found in focusing on what’s possible.”
Bonassisa says the team has extended its efforts by using the bags to create care packages of donated clothing for those COVID-19 patients who had to dispose of or send home their clothing during hospital admission. They’ve also used the blue wrap for isolation caddies in the doorways patient rooms.
“When I joined the Green Team, I was not yet a true environmentalist,” Bonassisa says. “But what I have learned has opened my eyes to all the things that we as a healthcare industry can do better in order to ensure a healthier future for our community.”
Team members (from left to right):
Melissa Bonassisa, Medical Imaging Supervisor; Tami Ochs, RN, Behavioral Health; Carolyn Brown-Dancy, Director, Environmental Health & Safety, Atlantic Health System; Adisa Mesalic, Manager, Strategic Sourcing; Samantha Pierson (photo not available), Strategic Sourcing Analyst
Pharmacy Excellence Award
Tenet Healthcare | Dallas, Texas
Tenet Healthcare, a health system comprising 65 hospitals and 510 outpatient centers and other facilities across the U.S., won a 2020 Member Recognition Award for its commitment to a number of pharmacy initiatives that significantly decreased hospital costs.
Extended across all 65 hospitals, some of the initiatives included radiographic and MRI contrast conversion, IV sets and solutions transition, conversion of some pharmaceuticals to biosimilars, lung surfactant conversion, antimicrobial stewardship, and the full implementation of a new pharmacy productivity model.
Matt Moss, Director of Pharmacy Operations for Tenet Healthcare, says the cost savings from these initiatives were significant. “We estimated an approximate 4% inflationary increase in pharmaceutical expense, based on HealthTrust guidance,” he says, “but we were actually able to offset that and reduce our total cost below the prior year.”
Moss says his team defined goals early on in the year, then looked at baseline costs per adjusted patient day to develop targets by facility. They then produced monthly dashboards that had each hospital’s initiative and performance listed, which Moss says brought transparency to the project.
“To have information that allows them to see where they are in relation to their peers helped gain buy-in from the directors and hospital leadership on these initiatives,” Moss explains. “This involved not only the implementation of clinical best practices but was also a data-driven approach. Involving benchmarks allowed the facilities to compare themselves to their own historical performance and against one another.”
Team Members (from left to right):
Traci Holton, PharmD, MBA, FASHP, Vice President, Ancillary Services Optimization; Matt Moss, PharmD, MBA, Director, Pharmacy Operations; Ryan Koca, PharmD, MBA, BCPS, Director, Clinical Pharmacy; Jordan Cottam, PharmD, BCPS, Regional Director, Pharmacy Operations; Sally Sims, PharmD, Regional Director, Pharmacy Operations
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