Adrienne Ainsworth
Director, Strategic Sourcing
Advocate Aurora Health, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
About Adrienne Ainsworth:
Adrienne Ainsworth’s mother, Sharon Spencer, has been a respiratory therapist for over 30 years, and her late stepfather, Dale Spencer, worked in the pharmaceutical industry. Add some other relatives who were in nursing, and is it any wonder Adrienne is in healthcare today?
After college, Ainsworth accepted a role at Agiliti (formerly UHS) in Minneapolis, supporting clinical engineering services and later managing the purchasing and logistics teams. “Once I got into the industry, I realized I really enjoyed the business side of healthcare,” she says. “I love collaboration and the thrill of being able to provide great solutions to help people in a different way outside of direct patient care.”
At UHS, she took on a project management role in manufacturer services, providing preventive-maintenance and repair services on behalf of equipment manufacturers. In that role, she also helped manage scheduling and billing. Then an opportunity opened up in supply chain. “It was fascinating to me – fast-paced and critical to organizational success,” she says. Ultimately she became responsible for purchasing for UHS, one of the largest buyers of medical equipment in the country.
“I had great leaders who helped me develop in my career,” she says. Exposure to company executives opened up new challenges and opportunities. “As someone with a neuroscience background, I had never even taken an accounting class.” To develop some business acumen, she got an MBA. “It helped me become more credible, and it helped me be a better leader and employee.”
Seeking a position in which she could more directly support patient care, she took on a leadership role with Allina Health System in Minneapolis, Minnesota, supporting strategic sourcing in lab, capital and purchased services. In 2015, she moved to Milwaukee to lead the clinical strategic sourcing team for Aurora Health (now Advocate Aurora Health).
About Advocate Aurora Health:
Advocate Aurora Health serves nearly 3 million patients annually in Illinois and Wisconsin across more than 500 sites of care. It is a leading employer in the Midwest with more than 70,000 employees, including more than 22,000 nurses and the region’s largest employed medical staff and home health organization.
Most interesting/challenging project in the past 12-18 months:
“The most exciting supply chain project I’ve worked on over the last year has been the Advocate Aurora Health merger,” which occurred in April 2018, says Ainsworth.
“As two sourcing teams from like-sized systems came together, we quickly realigned resources to optimize talent, established best practices, leveraged analytical tools to identify variation in practice and cost, and partnered with service line leaders across the system to set short-term and long-term strategies for every strategic category,” she says.
“We’ve had excellent engagement with our physician leaders. In our approach, sourcing doesn’t make decisions unilaterally. Our job is to partner with clinical service lines and physicians, get their feedback, specs and expectations, and source what they want at the best possible price. We’ve been successful in getting the value we need. This exercise resulted in substantial savings in the first six months of the merger, and a roadmap for the next year.”
Looking forward to:
“As Advocate Aurora Health moves to a common EMR and ERP platform over the next year, our team will be able to better normalize disparate data and enrich our quality and cost-per-case tools, allowing for more transparency and enhancing clinical engagement. Investment in these tools helps supply chain champion evidence-based decision-making while optimizing total value, reflecting the needs of our patients and providers.”
Biggest challenge/change facing healthcare supply chain professionals in the next 5 years:
“As healthcare policy uncertainty and cost pressures continue to mount, the healthcare industry is facing rapid consolidation, increased consumerism and price transparency, and redesign toward a value-based care model. For supply chain, this means investment in and thoughtful development of technology to harness ‘big data’ and partnering more closely with clinicians across an ever-growing care continuum to optimize the value of products and services.
“It all goes back to the patient. We won’t pay more for technology that doesn’t make a difference to the patient. And if the vendor claims it does, we need to be able to prove that – and we should be able to do that by looking at our own internal metrics.”