Enterprise Class Business Intelligence combined with expert analysis will provide substantial short and long-term supply cost improvements
CentraMed Spend highlights areas for supply cost savings that will directly and meaningfully impact a provider’s bottom line. CentraMed’s healthcare analytics platform allows providers to easily monitor and analyze their supply expense anomalies. CentraMed Spend typically demonstrates a minimum of 2% to 4% in annual saving opportunities for providers translating to a 1% to 2% improvement in net profit.
CentraMed Spend combines the power of business intelligence with expert consulting services to help providers reduce supply chain costs and ensure the lowest and correct prices are being paid on an ongoing basis. Traditionally, providers have had a difficult time tracking and analyzing their spend data due to standardization problems and the lack of good analytical solutions. In addition, supply item master issues such as inconsistent item descriptions, inconsistent vendor and manufacturer names, missing charge codes, duplicate items, blank fields, and missing items have only compounded this challenge.
Providers also experience significant price fluctuations for items from different manufacturers and vendors. This is especially true for surgical supplies where physician preference for a specific manufacturer or vendor may have a much higher cost than the same item from a different manufacturer or vendor. Hospitals that have begun looking closer at their supply costs have noted the quality of care measures are the same for a specific procedure even when there is high variation in supply expense for the same procedure. Providers may also lose money when they pay more than the contractual rate for an item, or the best market price.
The CentraMed Spend team first analyzes purchase orders, vendor master, and item master data received using a cleansing process to ensure data quality. The cleansed data is then mapped to CentraMed’s reference database in order to standardize the data. The reference database is based on years worth of spend data from all major suppliers. It is important that the data is standardized before the dashboards and reports are created.
The CentraMed business intelligence platform offers pre-built dashboards and reports for spend management metrics, and also allows users to create custom dashboards as well as ad hoc reports. The custom dashboard and ad hoc reporting features are very user friendly and are created using simple drag and drop functions. This pre-built and ad hoc reporting allows users access to very powerful analytics as well as actionable information based on price variations that can be used to make necessary changes resulting in significant spend savings.
Another key benefit of the data quality process is a clean and standardized item master. Through ongoing monitoring, overall data quality continues to increase over time. This is not only useful for valid spend analysis, but the item master can then be linked to the charge description master ensuring the correct price ends up on the patient’s bill. This ensures optimal reimbursement for a supply or implant. CentraMed Spend is delivered as a combination of our analytics platform plus subject matter expertise. Our clients pay an affordable monthly fee offering a substantial return on investment.
The expert management of sources, tier pricing and the linking of the item master to the charge description master will define future best practices. Spend management is rapidly becoming the new revenue management. CentraMed Spend typically demonstrates a minimum of 2% to 4% in annual saving opportunities for providers translating to a 1% to 2% improvement in net profit.
