Making Sense of Outsourcing in Healthcare
What does disruptive innovation really mean? Here at Cohealo we think it means innovating specific services and products to solve specific answers to problems in healthcare. Through partnerships with our customers we want to focus on building new solutions to old problems – there is no disruption, rather a symbiotic relationship throughout the discovery, requirements building, product development, service creation and implementation between us and our clients. We are providing real answers and real solutions that provide health systems with financial improvements – incremental case revenue and cost avoidance savings.
In reading the attached article, it reinforced many of my previous beliefs in what Cohealo is providing to our clients. “Driven by the ever lower costs of global communication and online collaboration tools, Henry Ford’s vertically integrated organization is yielding to Proctor and Gamble’s network of external innovators.” I couldn’t agree more – healthcare is such a complex supply chain that health systems have to look outside to subject matter experts to refine and optimize specific areas of concern. One of those is supply chain and asset management. A hospital should have a firm grasp of it’s specifically owned devices, many would assume. But what happens when you look at the data?
A hospital could have thousands of owned medical devices and instruments, it could also rent hundreds more and lease even more on top of that. Each of these assets may need to be on a preventative maintenance plan, each may need calibration prior to each case to ensure patient safety, each may need maintenance on a monthly or quarterly basis, and within each year the hospital may review their budgeting process to analyze the purchase of another $5million worth of new assets. Think about the process involved which includes biomedical engineering, materials management, facilities management, directors of surgery, physicians and other personnel at the hospital to ensure that these assets are in the right place at the right time for every patient need. Now – think about the most common situation that every hospital is part of a health system – take these issues times 10 or 20, this is what hospital leadership deals with every day.
Per the attached article, “Consider how the largest consumer packaged goods firms are outsourcing an activity that has become vital to the top and bottom line: making sense of huge volumes of customer data. You might think these companies should crunch and analyze this data themselves.” Just like hospitals, most major organizations create huge amounts of data that they can utilize to make future decisions; and just like hospitals, many firms have data in many formats and coming out of many systems. The reason they outsource this data analytics is because there is an art to taking the data outside of these systems and learning from this data. Cohealo Share Platform is a tool that our customers utilize in conjunction with our service, it allows us to collect pertinent information from the health system as a whole, so that we can aggregate all data quickly and identify the ‘blind spots’ that once addressed, can add tangible benefits to the client.
Whether the data proves that another asset needs to be purchased – for regional utilization to meet an aggregated demand – or that a device is under utilized at one location and it should be switched to another location to reduce maintenance costs; data being reviewed by our team daily/weekly/monthly allows us to find common ‘hot spots’ that we can address nationally with each of our customers.
“As Charlie Kantz, VP Supply Chain with Lighthouse Consulting, told me, many companies lack visibility into, and control over, their products as they move through the pipeline. Yet a number of easy to use software apps can provide managers with visibility and control of inventory from the order to a store shelf. The technology (browser based apps and cloud infrastructure) for these apps didn’t exist five years ago.” I know, I was in the healthcare market working with Electronic Medical Records system and we couldn’t provide a great solution 5-10 years ago because the IT wasn’t readily available. Today, the technology is so much better – and cheaper – that working with an outside vendor with specific expertise is much more cost effective. Now that getting the data is easier for health systems, and the new data set provides clarity to old legacy solutions information, optimization within the healthcare supply chain is within reach.
Thanks, as always, for spending some time with us here at Cohealo. Drop me an email with comments, I’ll be sure to address in a future blog – the conversation continues. Till next time…