Control at the Clinical Point of Service — Healthcare Procurement’s Most Essential New Lever

Modern, private marketplaces are serving to bridge operational performance gaps between public and private sector healthcare providers. In procurement, the best systems can now translate and satisfy demand across commodity and sensitive preference categories alike. By controlling the clinical point of service, they are enabling a default state of compliance, thereby setting the table for all sorts of patient outcome-based improvements.

What’s changed? Given the scale, scope and complexities of the items and services purchased in healthcare, intelligent filtering at the clinical point of service is required. A sophisticated combination of indexing, machine learning algorithms and a deep knowledge of clinical context must be optimized for search relevance and speed. They must perform like they know who the requisitioner is, what he/she is looking for and where he/she is located at the time of requisition — a perfect example of artificial intelligence [AI].

Beyond filtering, when an item or service is purchased it must be matched to the correct source and applicable contract(s). This is accomplished via processes designed to capture conditional contractual benefits. Beyond simply alerting when specific volumes are achieved potentially triggering rebates and discounts, the system should be optimized to proactively accelerate their realization. 

Mapping such nuance is a challenge requiring intimate knowledge of clinical settings in public sector constructs. Attempts aimed at abstracting benefit from cross-industry marketplace systems are foolish. General purpose systems have a track record of failure in healthcare’s private sector and will fail in the public sector for the same reasons.

Data challenges that have long encumbered healthcare procurement progress are collapsing. Not only are useful enrichments of the market data now “gettable,” but they have been standardized and simplified for consumption via new, efficient and automated processes. In situations where the provider’s consumption data lack sufficient detail and are incomplete, item masters can now be built effectively and virtually.

Why isn’t this common? It doesn’t help that Healthcare’s IT leadership has slowly recognized the difference between the data themselves and the systems that host them. While modern systems serve to ease traditional integration challenges, none of the system vendors are content providers.

Projects aimed at integrating supply chain data with ERP are never an “off the shelf” exercise. Therefore, successful integrations require deep involvement of content providers that know the clinical setting, understand its workflows and can shape implementations to support of stated project objectives. 

Healthcare’s procurement leadership has been mired in data challenges for decades. With due respect to those challenges, micro-service solutions are now available. In summary, healthcare leadership would be well-served to stop attacking the “data problem” the same way, with the same vendors, and expect different results. Effectively embedding these services into the marketplace ecosystem establishes a single source of truth that can be shared with all points of demand.

Controlling the POS is established, critical functionality across industry. Despite the stakes being higher in healthcare, controlling the clinical POS remains an ideal. If any controls exist, they are suggestive versus absolute, so measuring value remains a fuzzy exercise. Meaning, healthcare’s reliance on a requisitioner’s resourcefulness is not a strategy.  While it may seem backward to constrain personal initiative, rewarding maverick spending is antithetical to good procurement practice. If the overarching goal is to eliminate variance, then the need to create a default state of compliance, which requires full control at the clinical POS, is self-evident. 

The ability to control the clinical POS is a predicate for real time marketplace value-tracking. It changes everything. Armed with the business intelligence and controls required to manage purchasing behaviors as desired and warranted, buyers and sellers can contemplate more fluid supply arrangements. It is an especially powerful lever when cross-organizational deals for high preference items and services are being negotiated. It supports a vastly improved supplier engagement model whose benefits are equally relevant across the private/public healthcare sectors.

Modern requisitioning systems provide procurement leadership a way to shape requisitioning in support of broader organizational strategies and to take fully-informed corrective actions when necessary.
 

Prodigo Solutions, which specializes in improving healthcare supply chain management performance, has been selected as a key subcontractor by Liberty IT Solutions, a prime vendor on the Transformation Twenty-One Technology Next Generation (T4NG) Supply Chain Master Catalog project. In partnership with Liberty, Prodigo’s searchable catalog solution will provide a single source of truth (SSoT) to the VA to drive contract compliance and accelerate data standards adoption.