September 7, 2023 – Brad Forth is the System Vice President of Sourcing and Vendor Management at SSM Health, which provides health care to communities across Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Read an excerpt from The Journal of Healthcare Contracting’s “10 People to Watch in Healthcare Contracting” below.
What has sourcing been like this year compared to the last few?
Sourcing hasn’t changed all that much, but the challenges we’re facing are different. You have the constants of aligning with our clinical programs or our service lines to support their defined standards of care: identifying key attributes in the products or services that they need, verifying clinical acceptability, and working to put together a strategy that drives competitive friction to determine what the market will bear.
The new challenges that we are facing are around supply assurance and mitigating supplier reactions, or predictions, to inflation. Historically suppliers wouldn’t come midterm looking for price increases or insist on building guaranteed year-over-year price increases into agreements. They are now. The team has gotten really comfortable with those conversations and deploying mitigating strategies. The team is also now spending an inordinate amount of time sourcing clinically acceptable subs necessitated by all of the backorders. The team is working to balance these headwinds with our strategic efforts, but necessary to support the immediate needs of our caregivers.
Besides value, what are some other ways you measure success for your team?
We do maintain qualitative type metrics beyond value. We have metrics around productivity, number of contracting actions per FTE, number of new requests received and completed.
But I don’t really consider any of those a measure of success. One of the key ways I measure success is through our retention rate and team engagement. If we have a motivated workforce that’s excited to be here, we’re delivering on value, and we have low turnover, that tells me we’re doing something right. I sit back and watch how the team engages with each other, how they engage with our end users, how our end users engage with them, to get a sense of how things are going. If I can see positive, respectful, strategic engagements, I’m super happy and view that as success.
Read more in the latest issue of The Journal of Healthcare Contracting.