Riverside Medical Center of Kankakee, Ill., expects supply savings of more than half a million dollars by joining the Illinois Purchasing Collaborative, a program of the Illinois Hospital Association and the Premier healthcare Alliance to reduce members' supply chain costs.
"As a long time participant in IHA's Illinois Provider Trust and a subscriber to Premier's Healthcare Informatics division, it only made sense for us to evaluate the IPC," said Phillip Kambic, Riverside's president and CEO. "The customized field support provided by IPC will enable us to make the most of savings opportunities in the long run."
According to Kambic, the cost analysis process identified a 92 percent exact and equivalent product match rate to Riverside's former group purchasing organization product portfolio in the medical-surgical and pharmaceutical product areas.
"Riverside is a classic example of how the collaborative is intended to work," said IHA President Ken Robbins. "The hospital and IPC management teams are working side by side to identify opportunities and evaluate the savings shown during the value analysis process."
With the addition of Riverside, there are 25 Illinois and two Indiana hospitals in the IPC. Robbins said members currently benefit from 63 regional contracts that are providing savings of more than $2.4 million annually over and above savings generated by Premier contracts. He added that IPC members take advantage of the IPC's collaborative model for enhancing supplier contracts and negotiating regional contracts.
Riverside joins Thorek Memorial Hospital of Chicago and the two hospitals of The Methodist Hospitals, Inc., in Gary, Ind., as the most recent IPC members. When IHA launched the IPC in May 2006, it was only the second statewide hospital association to establish a regional aggregating and contracting resource to provide hospital members access to pricing tiers previously unattainable.