Patrick Flaherty
Senior director, integrated performance solutions and transformational economics, UPMC, Pittsburgh, Pa.
UPMC is an IDN that consists of more than 22 hospitals; 4,700 licensed beds; 400 clinical locations; 17 senior living communities; $2.6 billion annual spend on supplies, equipment and services.
When Patrick Flaherty joined UPMC’s largest facility, Presbyterian University Hospital, in 1994, he was engaged in technical writing and public relations while completing an undergraduate degree in pursuit of a Juris Doctorate. Today, he leads UPMC’s core systems’ support team, which manages day-to-day operations for four enterprise resource planning and warehouse management systems. He also oversees e-commerce and content, as well as PMO groups, and develops programmatic approaches and contract strategies to address the transition in healthcare from volume to value.
The Journal of Healthcare Contracting: What has been the most challenging and rewarding project you have been involved in recently?
Patrick Flaherty: One of my most interesting projects has addressed ways in which an IDN can legally offer benefits to non-owned facilities. Factors such as the Affordable Care Act, increased co-pays and heightened regulatory requirements are leading to significant fiscal instability for independent acute care facilities across the country. Our goal has been to evaluate the best services for delivering operational relief to enable independent facilities to remain financially viable. The project, which included supply chain senior leaders and a group of attorneys that specialize in antitrust and anticompetitive laws and regulations, constructed strategic guidelines and structures that permit contracting models that are not restricted to a typical GPO approach.
JHC: Describe a project you look forward to implementing in the next year or two.
Flaherty: We are participating in a project that involves developing a significant part of a cardiovascular information system. We are leveraging our e-commerce technology and the populated cardiology products, all of which have been augmented with additional strategic item level attributes. In addition, we are working with our revenue cycle department to create a process that permits us to apply charge codes to each item, rather than the traditional approach. We believe this process has significant opportunity for expansion into an integrated process across EMR, billing, MMIS and ERP systems.
JHC: What is the most important quality you look for in a supplier partner?
Flaherty: I look for integrity and must be able to trust the accuracy (with regard to content and intent) of what is being discussed. I also look for accountability, particularly given these times of unprecedented transformation in healthcare. Historically, suppliers have provided very little in the way of performance warranties, preferring that providers bear the risk that the cost of products is justified by their incremental benefit to patients. The ability of suppliers to join providers in offering patients better outcomes and lower costs is core to transformative healthcare.
JHC: What is the greatest change we can expect to see in healthcare contracting in the next five years?
Flaherty: We need to address the real drivers of increasing product costs which continually add to the burden of care. All parties must collaborate on lowering the cost of sales and care. We need to create universally accepted performance metrics that consider the incremental benefit of one product over another. And, we need to reconcile the movement toward population-management goals, which have the predilection to design and purchase products with marginal performance improvements.