Intermountain Healthcare's supply chain chief will take his talents to Pensiamo, a supply chain venture recently formed by UPMC and IBM.
Joe Walsh, vice president and chief purchasing officer at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain, has been named executive vice president of operations at Pensiamo. He will start Nov. 7. Once Pensiamo is up and running, hospitals will be able to entirely outsource management of their supply-chain operations to the Pittsburgh-based firm, which will use the IBM Watson cognitive computing system to inform its purchasing decisions.
Walsh has been working at Intermountain since 2008. In addition to being a well-recognized leader in healthcare supply chain, Intermountain owns Intalere, a St. Louis-based GPO.
At Pensiamo, Walsh joins a number of former UPMC supply-chain executives who transitioned to the company, which will manage all of UPMC's day-to-day supply chain operations.
Pensiamo, which was formed in July, is majority-owned by UPMC, with Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM owning about 10%. The venture marks Watson Health's first foray into healthcare supply chain, and it's the first time that Watson will connect both clinical and operational insights.
An Intermountain spokesman said it's the health system's “intent to fill the position and that process is underway.”