December 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Senior Vice President, Chief Procurement and Real Estate Officer, Sentara Health
Jennifer McPherren is the Senior Vice President and Chief Procurement and Real Estate Officer for Sentara Health, a 12-hospital healthcare delivery organization with a large integrated health plan headquartered in the state of Virginia. Sentara is a true Integrated Delivery Network exceeding $11 billion in revenues. Half comes from the provider side of their business and the other half comes from their insurance plan sector.
McPherren has oversight for all supply chain functions including procurement, sourcing, contracting, value analysis, supply chain analytics, distribution, logistics, receiving and courier services. But just as complex, she also manages the Corporate Facilities arm of the organization which is comprised of planning, design, construction, facilities management and property management and real estate services. Sentara has one of the largest healthcare footprints in Virginia with over 700 active leases and approximately 12 million square feet of buildings.
What’s unique about your team? How do you measure success beyond just numbers?
Our approach at Sentara has focused on securing specialized content experts in each operational area they represent.
For our contract negotiators, we focus on hiring attorneys who either litigate for a living or have a proven contract transaction background. For our clinical sourcing and value analysis roles, we seek to hire nurses or technicians who are experts in the service lines they support. They come to us competent in the vendor product offerings and the needs of their correlating physicians. Our ERP Release Manager hire had strong applications integration skills while at the same time was versed in distribution and warehousing systems. Our System Operations Director, who is responsible for moving thousands of packages daily, comes from the logistics industry. Our data analysts, for the most part, are engineers or Six Sigma Lean experts.
We consciously ensure that we have a balanced hiring approach. We seek talent from the healthcare industry, but we also bring in people from outside our industry to make sure we’re considering solutions in the most progressive way possible. This approach has allowed us to meet the organization’s ever-evolving demands while remaining a lean team, which has yielded substantive value and has positioned the division as a strategic lever for the business. We measure key indicators within each pillar of the supply chain division. There are only 50 metrics on our dashboard we concentrate on that create clarity as to how we’re achieving our targets, but more importantly, consistently advancing our program.
Do you have a story of how that outside perspective has benefited your organization and your supply chain?
Sentara Health has a large courier fleet. Our vision and approach towards operations was always rooted from the healthcare lens for courier services. Recently we brought in a leader who came to us from the Air Force. He had logistical oversight and managed over 100,000 military vehicles and specialized equipment moving them all over the globe. His fresh approach focused on efficiencies on how we can deploy things differently, allowing us to absorb more volume with the same number of resources, leveraging both our team members and our vehicles in a more effective manner. It has improved our customer satisfaction with the hospitals we serve, as well as our 300 sites of care.
Bringing in someone from outside the healthcare industry who thinks about our operations differently has allowed us to support our customers in a much broader fashion.
What’s a recent project or initiative you’ve been excited about?
Our Sentara Community Care mobile outreach program. We’re investing in making health and wellness services easy and convenient by bringing care directly to the neighborhoods in the communities we serve. It focuses on the uninsured and underinsured residents of Virginia.
We’ve retrofitted different types of mobile units to bring medical and social health services to historically marginalized and under-resourced communities. We provide care where it’s convenient for those patients where they live, work, learn, play and worship. Picture large buses equipped with mammography, mobile CT or ultrasound units. We go into communities where it may be difficult to travel or get time away from work or family obligations in an effort to advance health equity and improve disparity gaps. Patentis will get comprehensive care, whether it’s behavioral health services, checkups, prenatal care, breast imaging or whatever their needs may be.
How do you try to anticipate disruptions and prepare your team to face them?
I lean on my leadership team. We have intentional sessions where we ask, “What would be catastrophic and how would we handle it? What keeps you up at night? What skill sets don’t we have that are needed on the team? What are we not doing today and what’s preventing us from doing it?” Then we make active plans on how to solve them.
A good example relates to the recent events we’re managing through with IV fluids. Unrelated we were preparing for potential impacts of the longshoreman strike, and we considered, “What are our most critical items and how much supply do we have on hand?”
Sentara is a just-in-time organization, so our forecasting capabilities are critical to ensure we have the product in stock we need. Our team spent time identifying critical supplies, ordering up and bringing them into our safety reserve warehouse. The benefit of planning for the strike was timely as we had additional supply on hand that was impacted by the manufacturer affected by the hurricane.
How do you invest in your team and provide opportunities for them to grow in their roles?
One of the reasons I joined Sentara was because of the leadership’s commitment to invest in the supply chain division. Right away we completed a large assessment of the roles and responsibilities within each of the supply chain pillars and discovered there weren’t a lot of opportunities for advancement or specialization. We spent time determining where we wanted to be in five years and what positions need to be created to help us get there. How do we recruit and retain exceptional talent in those roles? How do we create layers for both expectations and opportunities to advance people in a meaningful way?