All Entries in the "Utilization Management" Category
The Cold Hard Facts About Supply Utilization Management
We often talk about utilization management in these terms: If not now, when? We can make this statement because utilization management is the only savings area left in your vineyard. Not only has your low-hanging fruit been picked and standardization been substantially achieved, but now your pricing is slowly disappearing. This isn’t conjecture any longer; [...]
4 Things You Should Know About Supply Utilization Management
After 16 years of research, investigations, and hands-on implementation of scores of supply utilization management programs, we have identified four things you should know about supply utilization management: 1. It’s a strategy you can no longer afford to ignore: Price and standardization have been the primary supply chain cost containment strategies for decades. Now that these [...]
Attacking Your In-Use Cost Or Price: What Will Give You A Better ROI?
I’m sure most of us in the supply chain business know that as of January 1, 2013, the medical device tax of 2.3 percent on gross revenues on medical device manufacturers kicks in for almost all medical products and technologies that you are now buying. Yes, I know that hospitals, systems and IDNs aren’t directly [...]
If You Waste Less, You Save More!
Waste is always a bad thing, and you would think that most healthcare organizations would be targeting unnecessary costs. To the contrary, waste is rampant in all but a few hospitals because they don’t see the benefits of eliminating cost that can’t readily be seen, touched, or recognized. Don’t fall into this trap! Here are [...]
What Happens When You Run Out of Price Savings?
I once asked this same question at a seminar I was conducting and a participant said, “She would find another line of work”. Another participant said “He would squeeze his suppliers even harder to find savings”. But the reality of the healthcare marketplace is that price savings are harder to find, contain, negotiate or even [...]
Healthcare Supply Utilization Management Checklist
There has been a lot of buzz in supply chain circles since the book “Checklist Manifesto”, authored by Atul Gawande, was published in 2009. The theme of the book was how to get things right in the complex world that we live and work in. Since Gawande is a cancer surgeon it made the context [...]
Supply Dashboards Allow You to Be Everywhere in Your Supply Chain!
It’s getting almost impossible for supply chain managers to be everywhere in your supply chain operations to ensure that none of the wheels are falling off. But this doesn’t need to be the reality any longer! Hospital Supply dashboards can take up the slack and then give you unheard of visibility that will put you [...]
How to Stay Ahead of the Healthcare Supply Savings Game
I don’t know about your hospital, system or IDN, but most of the healthcare supply chain professionals we talk to tell us that their price and standardization savings are drying up! Well, this state of affairs shouldn’t surprise you after decades of your GPOs and your own efforts to squeeze the last pennies out of [...]
The Best Defense is a Good Offence
We in the hospital supply chain business need to aggressively defend our supply expense cost structure, since cost is our enemy and we must always be on the attack. The primary reason for embracing this attitude is that there is always slippage, leakage and upward swings in your supply expenses that must be ratcheted down [...]
Why You Should Only Hire The Best of The Best Hospital Supply Chain Employees
Steve Jobs got it right when he suggested that the difference between the best worker and the average worker may be a ratio of 25:1 in creativity, efficiency and productivity. To get across this point, Jobs used the analogy of going to New York and you get the best cab driver in the city, you [...]
