Savings Beyond Price -Weekly eNewsletter – May 27, 2009

Robert T. Yokl

President & Chief Value Strategist

 

Are You Really Different?

Greetings,

When we discuss our benchmark findings with our clients they often say, “My hospital is different”.  This is frequently their first reaction to savings opportunities we have uncovered for them with our UTILIZER™ Dashboard. The question they should be asking themselves is, “why are we different?

Here’s why! Hospitals of the same size, type and with similar operating characteristics should be utilizing, within an acceptable range, their individual products, services and technologies at the same velocity and intensity.

If you find that you are NOT within an acceptable range (plus or minus 3%) through benchmarking, then you need to seriously question why not. In some cases, you will find that you are indeed different and your benchmarks need to be reset to account for your legitimate differentiation. Here are three reasons in which hospitals are genuinely different:

1.                Unique Conditions – One hospital we worked with was utilizing a huge quantity of disposable bath systems only to find that they didn’t have showers in their patient rooms. This physical constraint required this hospital to use more of this product since they had no alternative.

2.                Management Fiat – A client’s corporate office mandated that their four hospitals standardize on hyper-allergenic gloves throughout their facilities. Naturally, they would have more dollars in this category of purchase than their peers.

3.                Operating Culture – It was decided by another client of ours that they would employ Oxisensors on their patients using PCA Pumps for Pain Meds. to make doubly sure they were safe. This substantially increased the volume of Oxisensors this hospital was buying.

4.                Tradition & Rituals – Another client of ours placed logos on many of their products (coffee/soda cups, patient water cups, carafes, etc.) that increased the cost on all of these commodities. This certainly made them different than most of our clients.

So as you can see, there are justifiable reasons why your hospital might be DIFFERENT in the way you utilize your products, services and technologies.  However, these outliers are not be construed as common practices in our industry. That’s why you need to measure and observe why you are different, before you can make the case that your hospital is really different!

 

Your Partner In Savings Beyond Price™,

Robert T Yokl

Chief Value Strategist

Strategic Value Analysis® In Healthcare

Bobpres@strategicva.com

1-800-220-4274

 

P.S. Our clients find that our UTILIZER™ Dashboard is an easy way to indentify utilization misalignments, instead of just “skimming the surface” of their savings.  Take a “test drive” today!