Podcast 72 - How Utilization Reporting Helps You Pick Up Savings Opportunities Including Price

Price is a very simple element of the healthcare supply chain
procurement process. You order the product at that price and get
the total spend for that line-item product. This is the total spend
that we see every day from the vendors and manufacturers that we
purchase from. Now envision this same scenario happening to
thousands or even tens of thousands of products on an ongoing basis
at your health system. Standard operating procedure, right? That is
a lot of prices to look after and, yes, a heck of a lot of spend to
track after as well. There is a synergy to these that add up to the
total spend cost at your organization. No surprises here, yet. None
of this is surprising anyone in the healthcare supply chain world,
but the true “total cost” really involves keeping the
organization’s quantity used to the lowest possible level while
maintaining the best price. There are many ways that price can get
out of line, but we also need to track utilization cost, which goes
beyond total cost and uses a patient volume centric metric to
measure it. So, tracking Cost Per Adjusted Patient Day to the
Supply Category Cost or Cost Per Cath Lab Case Per the Cath Lab
Category is a quality measuring tool. So, why aren’t we employing
this further?