By Pete Mercer
October 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
The challenges the healthcare industry faces daily are nothing new – anyone who works in healthcare can tell you it comes with the territory. No challenge is insurmountable though – it’s all about finding creative ways to face those challenges headfirst.
At the Association of National Account Executives Annual Conference, Brent Petty moderated a conversation between Dameka Miller, VP, Strategic Sourcing for Trinity Health, and John Dockins, Executive Director, Strategic Sourcing for Cleveland Clinic, discussing the major challenges and issues facing the various stakeholders in today’s healthcare market.
The ANAE Annual Conference provides an opportunity for ANAE members and prospective members to network with their peers and customers, while hearing from leading supply chain executives and GPOs on working successfully with IDNS.
Looming cybersecurity threats
Cybersecurity attacks are becoming more and more commonplace in healthcare, revealing a frightening vulnerability in the care continuum. How are healthcare providers supposed to prepare for a cybersecurity threat?
Dockins said, “Cybersecurity threats are real – I think they are going to continue, and they are definitely on the rise. I think we must solve this one together, between us all in this room, suppliers, GPOs, and providers. Let’s get CISO’s talking, let’s get those information security people talking with each other. We need to open the dialogue about how we harden and secure the network across the spectrum.”
Creating that dialogue about securing healthcare networks could be a critical step towards avoiding cybersecurity disruptions. While some disruptions might only affect the financial services and payroll departments of healthcare providers, the most significant concern is a doomsday scenario that Dockins described later.
“I imagine this big red button that our CISO has access to when we are notified of a breach, and he pushes the red button and everything is cut off. Great. What if tomorrow that call comes in and says that patient monitoring is being affected? Can’t disconnect it. In the moment, you don’t know what the breach is. Is it a data breach? Would it impact the actual software of the equipment? Would it start to manipulate monitoring results? How would we deal with that? I don’t know if there’s an answer to that. I still get chills to myself because what keeps me up at night is how to keep our patients safe during something like that.”
That scenario is something that has been top of mind for Trinity Health’s CEO, Miller said. They recently launched a cross-functional team that is challenging everyone to imagine a scenario like that and how they can best respond to it. “We already have a separate IT system set up, so if there’s ever something that attacks our system, it’s going completely offline.”
Implementing artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is one of the hot-button issues across the board, but the potential of implementation in the healthcare space is an interesting exercise in simplifying processes throughout the care continuum. Miller discussed how her team is using artificial intelligence to improve their outcomes by taking over those routine tasks.
“We have a version of AI-informed bots that are doing the work in our procurement and accounts payable teams,” Miller said. “We’ve been able to program routine tasks so that two bots are able to do the work for about 10-plus FTEs now. We are also excited about the implementation of a contract life cycle management system with AI built into it, which will give us a better idea of how reimbursement and what we’re paying to the supply chain side are matching up. Finally, my team is using ChatGPT for third-party research.”
Dockins is looking to artificial intelligence for real-use cases in large language models. “It’s just taking massive amounts of data from multiple systems and putting it in one giant pot to predictably tell you what is happening or going to happen for things like different reimbursements by geography, demand planning, planning for backorders and allocation, and real-time inventory tracking.”
The role of value analysis
With a value analysis team, providers are equipped with the knowledge and resources they need to make better decisions on the supplies and products that the hospital purchases. Value analysis is a set of techniques, knowledge, and skills used to improve the value of a product by eliminating unnecessary costs or improving its functions without compromising its quality, reliability, and performance.
“At Trinity, we have what we call a clinical framework,” Miller said. “We have a clinical framework team that has oversight of, for example, wound care, and we have representation from across the country to weigh in on wound-type decisions. Our value analysis team is plugged into that, and they are tasked when something is new and emerging in the market. What’s the clinical evidence? What’s the reimbursement? What’s the potential cost impact? And positive or negative, the wound council is going to look at it and figure out if that’s the best thing for us to do because sometimes the low-cost solution is not always the best solution.”
The pandemic made the supply chain famous, bringing people like Miller and Dockins out of the basement and into critical conversations with the C-suite. That brings plenty of opportunities to improve efficiency and identify challenges in front of the major decision makers in the hospital, but it also creates an environment with more oversight on all the decisions that need to be made.
Dockins said, “If we look at the inpatient floors, I think we’d all agree that nurses are consistently stretched thin. They’re asked to do more, there’s fewer of them. We could probably spend the rest of the day talking about that challenge. However, traditionally, account executives have resources within your organization that you could apply and potentially come and put them on the floor for a temporary time basis and help us figure out if there is a better way, right? That’s where I think value analysis could go. That’s where we’re trying to push it. Yes, we’ll look at clinical evidence, yes, we’ll look at reimbursements – but how do we look at outcome data?”
The Journal of Healthcare Contracting would like to thank Allergan Aesthetics for sponsoring the ANAE Annual Conference.
