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immediate need.
Multiply that daunting task by several
hundred thousand
items, including hard- to-source, costly, and back-ordered ones, and throw in tight budgets, and you have some idea of why health care supply management is both vital and demanding.
“We continue to evolve
on our supply chain
transformation,” says Dave
Bueby, McLaren’s vice president
of supply chain management. One tool for innovation has been to channel the McLaren system’s large annual spend for supplies into a bargaining strength. In 2015, McLaren joined the “Shared Clarity” hospital purchasing group.
Shared Clarity teams us with major insurer United Health and physicians from health care organizations such as Advocate Health Care, Dignity Health, BaylorScott & White and McLaren to evaluate the e cacy of medical devices and equipment.
Such group buying power bene ts from Shared Clarity’s research on the value and quality outcomes of medical equipment, which can lead to substantial savings. Research on heart stents and pacemakers,
for example, “has brought signi cant
improvements in cost based on clinical
input,” says Bueby.
These e orts to temper medical purchases with
objective quality and pricing data are a fresh
approach for McLaren. “Physician preference”
items, for example, are speci c devices,
medications or equipment requested for use by
physicians outside the normal supply chain. Bueby notes that the cost of these items is signi cant — “over 80 percent of the expense in supplies, and typically minimal
attention has been paid in their selection.”
McLaren’s e orts with Shared Clarity, plus our internal research programs, are working to quantify the bene ts of physician preference items. If the data show them truly to be the best, most e ective tool for quality, everyone should be using them. If not, it’s time to rethink — and save budget dollars for more needed items. Some cardiac devices, for example, cost thousands of dollars. “If you can save 25 percent on each of them,” concludes Bueby, “that’s a signi cant, immediate, nancial impact.”
McLaren HeaLtH Care
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