HealthTrust’s Commercial Services & Products portfolio offers savings in surprising categories
A hospital is like a municipality. Most of the products and services a city needs to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a hospital needs as well, explains Allen Wright, HealthTrust’s SVP of Strategic Sourcing for Commercial Products. With this in mind, HealthTrust has developed the industry’s most comprehensive offering of nonclinical products and purchased services to improve member performance in addition to the HealthTrust med-surg and pharmacy GPO offerings.
“We are on a mission to assist our members with expense management across the entire healthcare provider campus,” explains Wright. “Our operator experience combined with member engagements have enabled the development of an extremely comprehensive set of solutions to help members address the breadth of their expenses.”
HealthTrust’s Commercial Services & Products portfolio spans across five primary segments consisting of indirect expenses, purchased services, facilities and energy, food services and information technology. It champions almost 400 supplier contracts across more than 160 categories with a roadmap to build 30 new categories solutions in the near future.
“It’s a very diverse and expansive portfolio with unique solutions that other GPOs don’t necessarily offer,” shares Guy Wagner, VP of Strategic Sourcing. “We want to expand awareness to make sure all of our members realize how much we have available. For those responsible for finance and accounting, we have Treasury Solutions to support accounts payable, which includes credit and ACH electronic payment programs and accounts receivable. For people in a hospital’s marketing or education functions, there are solutions to support both media and training responsibilities. For hospital staff who coordinate travel for their facility’s colleagues, we have a Travel Management program that offers competitive services for airfare, rental cars and hotels. In the operations area, our food agreements can create value for providers and increase patient satisfaction with solutions that work for self-operated or outsourced facilities. And we also have solutions that can help providers with their outsourced EVS, patient transport or facilities operations. HealthTrust’s IT agreements cover value-added resellers (VARs), equipment manufacturers, professional services and other organizational IT needs. Our contracted products and services literally touch every area of a hospital system’s operations.”
Energy & facilities solutions
HealthTrust’s energy and facilities solutions offer members easy and quick opportunities to realize savings and efficiencies. On the energy side, the team provides an assessment of members’ energy usage, needs and goals; negotiates competitively priced energy supply contracts, assists with risk management planning, and even helps resolve billing errors.
On the facilities side, one of the biggest opportunities for continued savings is for members to take advantage of HealthTrust’s offerings in the maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) category, says Nikko Giovino, AVP, Strategic Sourcing Commercial Products, Energy & Facilities for HealthTrust.
From the most straightforward solutions to implement (such as low VOC paint, acoustical ceilings and sustainable flooring) to those with the largest, longest impact (electrical distribution, elevator and mechanical services), savings can be found. “We have extremely competitive pricing in our Facilities and Construction portfolio,” Giovino adds, “with the opportunity for members to customize based on their usage, geography and size. It is also an extremely quick conversion.”
Purchased services contracts
A number of clinical and nonclinical services are covered through the Purchased Services category—from blood products, laundry and linens to security staffing, medical device repair and language/interpretation services. (See sidebar below.) The Purchased Services portfolio continues to expand as well. Members who take advantage of contracts in the portfolio can, on average, reduce operating costs by 8% to over 20%.
In recent years, this category has seen remarkable growth due to more member use and engagement. “We get feedback from our member Advisory Boards so we can better understand possible areas of opportunity to add suppliers or categories,” says Christina Katamay, AVP of Purchased Services.
HealthTrust’s strategic partner, Valify Solutions Group, advises members on where they can find value. “Our goal is to provide healthcare leaders with clear insight into their spend, which can ultimately optimize the patient experience,” shares Andy Motz, VP of Advisory Services for Valify.
The Valify technology provides the data categorization that allows insight into a health system’s spend. It also helps organizations identify savings opportunities and points them in the right direction for contracting options in the HealthTrust contract portfolio.
Valify Advisory leverages HealthTrust’s experience, knowledge and relationships to develop strategies that fit members’ unique needs in purchased services. “Part of our Advisory Services promise is that we are not just going to come in and tell you what to do,” explains Motz. “We’re going to learn how you operate and come up with a solution that is best for your hospital or IDN.”
For example, the Valify team worked with a member to maximize its contracted interpretation services spend. The Valify technology identified that the member spent more than $5 million annually on eight interpretation services suppliers. They created and handled an RFP process for the member and negotiated new rates.
Diverse suppliers
In the last decade, more and more healthcare organizations have set diversity goals. To help them meet those goals, they’ve turned to their GPO to aid them in identifying diverse suppliers, says Joey Dickson, AVP of Strategic Sourcing and Chief Supplier Diversity Officer for HealthTrust. “It’s not always easy to identify diverse businesses because many of them are small, local businesses without national reach,” he says.
HealthTrust leverages its nationwide relationships to identify which suppliers are owned by diverse populations. “By having the Supplier Diversity Program in existence, we’re making available to our members a portfolio of diverse companies across a broad spectrum of categories,” Dickson explains.
The HealthTrust team also asks its suppliers to tell them about their tier 2 relationships with diverse suppliers because those downstream relationships can count toward members reaching their supplier diversity program goals.
“If members are trying to achieve a set amount of diverse spend, we want to make sure that we’re helping them accomplish that as best we can by directing them to suppliers we’ve added to the portfolio or point out more opportunities, maybe with the companies they’re already working with,” Dickson says.
Members can also use the Valify technology to gain valuable insights into their diverse vendor spend. Motz shares, “Valify identifies supplier diversity according to 17 different classifications, enabling you to drill down into spend by category/subcategory and to monitor and align purchasing decisions toward your organization’s diversity goals.”
To learn more about the value of the Commercial Products portfolio or Valify, email commercial@healthtrustpg.com
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