An Open Thank You To A Different Kind Of Healthcare Hero

SpendMend Team

We have heard the brave stories of the doctors, nurses, spiritual advisors, and janitorial staff members standing face-to-face with COVID-19 and its direct impact and we thank them for their courage and efforts, but we also want to thank the unsung and forgotten about members of healthcare.

Thank you to the AP departments for managing the hospital payments and helping keep the vendor relations strong.

Thank you to the finance department for rearranging budgets, managing cash flow and navigating through new complex regulations.

Thank you, Supply Chain, Materials Management, and Procurement for working every avenue to find PPE supplies as well as supplying the hospitals with the normal everyday supplies.

Thank you to the GPO reps for connecting hospitals with suppliers while helping balance required supplies throughout the members.

Many Americans may not know that what you do but we recognize you and appreciate all of your efforts at this time.

We are here to support you and thank you for supporting patient care,

SpendMend

To read more about how SpendMend is addressing COVID-19 click here

4 Innovative Ways to Contain Healthcare Financial Leakage

SpendMend Team

Written By: Michael Koory, RVP of Sales

4 Innovative Ways to Contain Healthcare Financial Leakage 

The financial risk to health systems has never been higher. Decades of reimbursement reductions coupled with operating cost increases have left health systems executives no choice other than innovation. The traditional methods are no longer enough.

For something to be transformational, it must change to grow or metamorphize. And, change can be difficult even when moving from bad to good. We have all seen our New Year’s Resolutions fly out the window in March or even the end of January. So, what works? How can we bring the change so desperately needed to the health systems?

A Guide with a Map - If you have ever been lost in the woods or lost in a new city, you immediately understand the value of a guide and a map. If you rely (as I do) on your GPS to help navigate the way, it is easy to understand the value of a guide with a map. We all need someone who has trekked the path before to help us achieve our goals. A guide is especially essential in healthcare. Our industry is, in some of the most change persistent times in history. The layers of change heaped upon the healthcare providers are unprecedented.

Add Visibility - No one sets out to build a system with leaks. The course of stopping financial leakage is not about finding who failed or who didn’t do something. All procurement systems have oversight and usually excellent system controls. Healthy system purchasing operations are complex and contain millions of moving entities, because of the constant pace of change, compliance variable, and multiple human handoffs, control gaps exist. They exist, but they are hard to see because of dark data.

Illuminate Dark Data  – SpendMend views dark data as the practices, information, and system data hidden from the standard operative view. It exists due to disparate systems, numerous handoffs, multiple entities, vendor practices, not shared industry information, and practices. These cover the control gaps or cause the control gaps that lead to financial leakage.

Limit Financial Leakage  – Beyond the hard dollar financial costs, there are high soft dollar costs in the financial leakage. How much time does your staff spend chasing issues outside of their job description? How many corporate initiatives get inadvertently sabotaged because the team is distracted, chasing problems down outside of their department? Are you experiencing excess turnover? Are goals being missed? All of these are caused in part or entirely from financial leakage the strain of closing down the gaps.

The Path to Prevention  – There is hope, and the path is one I know exceptionally well from guiding clients down it in the past. My experience helping health executives by using a recovery audit has proven that a guided audit identifies more initial savings and more control gaps to close for future savings. Using a guided audit like SpendMend’s Mending audit can identify up to $1.25M for every $1 Billion in spend (click here to learn more from our webinar). You can innovate and contain loss in your health system.

Three Reasons Why Healthcare Companies Are Draining Cash!

SpendMend Team

Written By: Rob Heminger, President, rheminger@spendmend.com

In today’s complex business landscape, large organizations suffer costly operational lapses and significant financial leakage on a daily basis. The matter is particularly challenging in the healthcare industry and persists because hospitals and health systems face three major factors which create a challenging environment for healthcare professionals.

Our experience at SpendMend has revealed the impact of these three factors are particularly pronounced throughout the P2P cycle where a host of professionals throughout the finance, procurement, sourcing, and supply chain departments are under constant strain.

The three major factors and some of their sub-elements are listed below:

  1. Change:  Hospitals and Healthcare Systems face constant change regarding staff, management, software systems and even all the way down to which locations are in or out of their network in a given year.  It’s never-ending. Common changes include:
    • Hospital Mergers & Acquisitions
    • Upgrading /Changing ERP Systems, EHR’s
    • Restructuring Departments
    • Changing GPO Providers
    • Vendor Mergers
  2. Complexity: Departments tend to function independently and must navigate through a host of competing global rules and local exceptions including:
    • Silo Approach
    • Complex Partners (GPO’s & Vendors)
    • Complex, Non-Integrated Systems
    • Healthcare Regulation
  3. Compliance: In addition to a host of complex and high-stress job tasks, healthcare associates are expected to comply with internal controls and external regulations such as:
    • Return Module Utilization
    • Multiple Approval Points
    • Data Entry Procedures
    • Purchase Order Utilization

When we inspect these three factors and their prevalence in the healthcare industry, in particular, we see quickly that professionals throughout all corners of the P2P cycle are being forced to manage through constantly changing complex environments in an unending pursuit to remain compliant with controls and regulations. As a result, healthcare organizations lose millions of dollars annually due to factors well beyond their control.

Organizations hoping to get a handle on their operational lapses and financial leakage need to consider a three-pronged mindset to ensure that they are addressing each of these issues and creating resolutions to shore up risk and loss.

Have you stopped to think about your own environment and considered the impact of these factors on you company’s productivity?  At minimum you should be opening up water cooler conversations with your co-workers to get their perspectives on the level to which change, complexity, and the pursuit of compliance is impacting your organization.

Any company looking to further diagnose their environment we encourage you to tap into the SpendMend network. We would be happy to put you in touch with our community of clients, partners, and consultants who have deep experience in assessing healthcare environments and helping companies to determine where they may be suffering from common and not-so-common problems.