Officials at Alamance Regional Medical Center report they were able to save $2 million on supplies last year by using a spending analytics tool that allowed physicians to identify savings opportunities.
ARMC is a 238-bed, private, not-for-profit hospital located in Burlington, N.C., and a member of the Premier healthcare alliance. Last year the hospital set a goal of saving $1 million by using the SpendAdvisor suite of services offered by Charlotte, N.C.-based Premier, Inc.
"As a result of implementing SpendAdvisor, we finished the year way ahead of our goal. Our savings have increased much more than we anticipated," said Supply Chain Director Wendell Osborne.
Osborne said he selected SpendAdvisor to gain better access to his spending data and to mine that data both for savings opportunities and operations improvement.
SpendAdvisor analyzes total supply spending and identifies savings opportunities by scrubbing data and providing comparative reports that can be used to guide purchasing decisions.
A function that has also been beneficial to the hospital is the national benchmarking, Osborne said, and the results have caught the attention of the medical staff.
"We've been able to tie the information from SpendAdvisor with finance and reimbursement so our physicians know what their spending habits are and how they affect the hospital," he said.
According to Osborne, the time SpendAdvisor saved the hospital was even more impressive.
"SpendAdvisor has saved me a ton of time. I am cutting down to a fraction of the time it used to take on projects. It used to take me about 20 hours to produce information that I now get out of SpendAdvisor in less than 10 minutes," he said.
SpendAdvisor's latest version features tier qualification logic that analyzes purchasing volume, units and market share from the past 12 months to determine automatically which tier a member will qualify for on a contract. The version also targets opportunities when the user is close to qualifying for additional savings by meeting new tier requirements as well as offers off-contract and non-contract conversion analysis, on-demand change of user preferences and more robust data logic rules.