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The starting point of any successful contracting initiative is transforming your data into quality, actionable information. Through Empower™, we will do this. We will give you a whole new perspective into your spend, trends, utilization, market shares, and price disparities across product categories, product franchises and product segments within disease-state service lines. We will identify and quantify your best savings opportunities to maximize your contracting strategies and processes.
Most hospital contracting teams are challenged to find the necessary time and resources to effectively implement a full-scale contracting program, let alone manage the entire PPI vendor contracting cycle.
Our Contracting Plan approach integrates advanced analysis, with the right project plan and team, with proven contracting methodologies – Capitation, Constructs, Matrix, Market Share, Utilization Mix – to create an implementable, ongoing cost savings program which best meets your hospital’s needs and landscape.
Within the PPI supply chain, there are hundreds of vendors with which most hospitals conduct business. Hospital contracting teams are faced with the challenge of navigating through vendor personalities and the positional tactics these vendors employ.
Our consultative approach to negotiation is one based on principle – developing interests, options, and legitimacy. We educate our clients to understand the difference between principle-based and positional-based negotiation tactics. Our approach employs a collaborative effort between purchasing, physicians & clinicians, and vendors. This is paramount to the success of any Strategic Contracting Plan.
Additionally, having an understanding of general terms and conditions that are deemed appropriate in the marketplace is important. While most hospitals have their own general terms and conditions, our list of recommendations may enhance yours.
Gaining agreement of terms and conditions from vendors through the negotiation process is important. However, prior to executing any vendor agreement, it is critical to ensure pricing is accurate and complete.
Through Empower™, we’ll conduct a detailed, line-item audit for every participating vendor’s RFP, Proposal, and/or Price Submittal to ensure compliance to the pricing terms prior to executing each vendor agreement. Our compliance matrix tool will allow you to quickly assess the status of your approval process.
This process can take hospitals days, if not weeks, to analyze. Empower™, in conjunction with our team, can report this analysis within hours, if not minutes.
Throughout the vendor contracting cycle, the PPI landscape continuously evolves. Conditions within the industry, the disease-state marketplace, and hospital utilization patterns continuously change. New technologies hit the market at a rate of approximately 20% each year. Understanding all of these conditions in a timely manner is important.
Through Empower™, in conjunction with our clinical project management team, we will continuously monitor your hospital’s landscape in relation to your vendor agreements, as well as to external marketplace conditions.
Tracking your performance is not only critical to spend management, but also to the integrity of your operations.
For each disease-state, we deliver an Empower™ Savings Review Dashboard, which tracks monthly, contract-to-date and fiscal year-to-date savings performance. Additionally, we deliver Empower™ Pricing Audit Reports, which provide detailed audits at the line-item level. This includes compliant purchases, non-compliant purchases (credit owed), non-contracted purchases (i.e. new technology, non-contracted items, etc.), and purchase order/product catalog audit.
If in the event our auditing processes report that savings begin to trend below expectations, we conduct a formal analysis of the situation and create an action plan to re-capture savings.