The Premier healthcare alliance is looking to boost cost savings opportunities and improvement goals for hospitals through its enhanced supply chain benchmarking tool, SupplyFocus.
"The newest version of SupplyFocus provides comprehensive reports focusing on more than 40 indicators that measure cost and operational performance against peer groups," said Premier Purchasing Partners president Mike Alkire. "SupplyFocus gives our member users a strategic edge by helping them make their supply spend more efficient and significantly impacting bottom line. We listened to what users were telling us they need to help them do a better job of managing scarce resources."
The SupplyFocus Facility Report provides performance snapshots based on a number of financial and operational indicators and departmental supply cost metrics. New functions allow the report to identify potential improvement opportunities for the facility and high supply utilization departments using custom peer groups.
"Key features include quarterly reports for frequent performance monitoring," Alkire said. "Annual roll-up reports can be run for any combination of four consecutive quarters. Identified improvement opportunities are calculated against the closest benchmarking quartile, so the focus is on incremental improvement."
The SupplyFocus IDN Report features a roll-up of financial and operational indicators and provides opportunity analysis using benchmark data calculated from peer IDNs. Also included are supply spend metrics and contract utilization information, including breakouts in areas such as labor, dietary, pharmacy and capital.
Additionally, SupplyFocus includes supplier data, allowing for analysis of contract pricing and penetration. The data analysis tool now provides custom peer grouping capability, allowing users to create peer groups and benchmarks employing demographic information as well as performance metrics.
As part of its new functionality, data submissions are Web-based, so users can download, e-mail, save and upload data.
Premier client service professionals work with participants to facilitate data submission, and all data is validated via an audit report before entering the database.
SupplyFocus also provides clear definitions for each data element to ensure apples-to-apples comparison among peer facilities. The database is enhanced with data from facilities that subscribe to Premier's OperationsAdvisor labor benchmarking application and subscribers receive SupplyFocus reports.
Premier officials say the application is being used by more than 700 hospitals and healthcare systems.
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E-mail Associate Editor Molly Merrill at molly.merrill@medtechpublishing.com.