When a health system adds an item to its inventory, the two most important questions in the equation are whether it will result in meaningful cost savings and whether it will lead to better outcomes for care receivers.
Seeking products that ensure the best results for patients at the lowest possible price is an obvious goal for any health system or organization. But how does a health system get to the point where both boxes are checked?
Aside from labor costs, supply chain spend is the largest expense for most healthcare organizations. Therefore, the ability to direct purchasing decisions to products that will prove to be most effective for care receivers as well as cost efficient for the organization are determining factors of a health system’s profitability.
Traditionally, supply chain decisions have been based on cost but in the changing landscape of healthcare an emphasis is being equally distributed between financial considerations, operational impact, and clinical outcomes.
Increasingly, organizations are turning to a process known as value analysis in pursuing products that meet these objectives.
What is Value Analysis?
Value analysis is a common method of review when organizations respond to requests for new products or technologies. It is a collaborative evaluation process that considers clinical, operational, and financial impacts of product decisions. Over time, it has evolved to being characterized as bringing the right people, the right data, and a greater amount of due diligence to the decision-making process for obtaining new products.
The objective of value analysis is to evaluate the functions of specific products, services, technologies, or processes to determine if the alternatives provide equivalent or better performance for a required function while also contributing to the financial health of the organization.
Supply chain disruptions and rising costs due to inflation – in recent years, everything from labor costs to the amount spent getting goods from the point of supply to the point of demand have been on the rise – have led to operating margin challenges for U.S. health systems. As a result, there has been greater scrutiny and discipline surrounding every choice and how it will affect the organization.
This is where a concept such as value analysis becomes impactful.
The Move Toward Value Analysis
The focus of the healthcare supply chain’s decision-making for years was primarily based on cost. But value analysis has come to encompass more than just financial considerations. Increasingly, its aim is arriving at the best possible outcome for care receivers at the lowest cost to both the patient and health system.
An organization is considered to have achieved maturity in this area when its employees understand and embrace the constraints for introducing new products, standardization initiatives become adopted, and best practices are embraced.
One element that is critical for evaluating any new product or technology is the value of the data used to inform the recommendation. If data is inaccurate or incomplete, the process could be tainted, and the outcome may not be suitable for the health system purchasing a product or the care receiver utilizing it.
This is where Prodigo Solutions can help with the value analysis process.
Prodigo as the Single Source of Truth
Prodigo’s mantra is to help clients get the right item, from the right source, at the right price. Its healthcare solutions assist health systems in their value analysis process by identifying products and services that are contractually-compliant, result in the best outcomes for care receivers, and offer financial advantage.
Prodigo’s Solution Suite ensures that health systems are able to check both boxes – improved ROI and better outcomes for patients – when evaluating whether a product meets its needs. And this is driven by clean data.
“Data needs to be accurate (connected to a single source of truth), managed (kept updated throughout the chain of custody), and connected (shared) across the organization’s technology ecosystem and clinically integrated into the decision support network,” said Marlin Doner, Prodigo’s VP of Product Strategy & Data Analytics, in a recent Healthcare Purchasing News article.
Prodigo’s Solution Suite helps to enrich and enhance data quality, ensuring that price data is up-to-date and item attributes are available to support the evaluation and capture of products consumed in the patient care event.
Its Data Hub delivers accurate master data, connecting a health system’s items, attributes, and metadata with the right contracted price, acting as the single source of truth for the supply chain. The data enablement platform enforces data quality standards and integrates clean data into the clinical requisition workflow through Prodigo’s virtual item master. This improves record keeping while also ensuring accurate cost capture and revenue reimbursement for each procedure.
The value analysis process determines whether a particular product should be added to a health system’s formulary – and the two factors that decide whether an item is selected or rejected are its potential for improved outcomes for patients and financial optimization for the system.
This aligns with Prodigo’s mission to connect health organizations with the right item, from the right vendor, at the right price – but also ensuring patients realize the best result.