Vice President of Strategic Sourcing and Contract Management, Novant Health
December 2023- The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Can you tell us about your role and responsibilities within your organization?
I am the Vice President of Strategic Sourcing and Contract Management for Novant Health. I have had this role for the last five years. I lead the team that’s responsible for contracting, but at the end of the day, it’s setting up the strategy for non-labor spend. We’re trying to understand the value propositions for all our third-party spend, whether or not it’s services, drugs, or supplies. My role is to empower my team to make the best decisions with their clinical and business owners. So, if they’re working well and getting the best value, then I figure my job is done.
What are some leading market forces impacting your supply chain team?
We can’t discount inflation. Then there are the post-COVID effects continuing to resonate within our health system.
Expenses need to come down, whether it’s in labor, contract, supplies, or drugs. In a normal timeframe, one of our goals in Strategic Sourcing is to reduce cost year over year. The unfortunate thing about the market forces we’re dealing with is that most of our third parties are unwilling or unable to reduce costs unless there’s some kind of value proposition for them, which we have been able to find in many areas, but not throughout the whole industry. They are suffering from increased prices and increased costs, therefore they’re trying to make sure they remain relevant.
But we’re trying to find that win-win, and not just in market share or growth year over year, which are the traditional levers. What are the key determinants for each one of those industries that is important for our third parties? It hasn’t made our job more complex, just more time sensitive.
The other challenge is the constant internal pressure for resources. Layoffs are a reality for many health systems. We have to figure out a way to do what we do better. Picture a big river and a small dam. The dam has always worked because it lets a little trickle in while you’re constantly working on it, but what’s coming in now is much more. You are so busy trying to fix the short-term cracks in the dam but don’t have enough resources to handle the long-term, increased volume. It’s important to keep the team engaged and flexible to address priorities and emergencies, while building long-term solutions to support a completely different delivery of care.
What projects or initiatives are you excited to work on?
ERP is something most healthcare systems are still trying to figure out. I was in manufacturing 15 years ago and we were going through an Oracle ERP implementation. In healthcare it seems like we’re just catching up. That’s what I think healthcare has been missing for a long time. There’s been a lot of emphasis on clinical support systems, but back-office supplies, systems that allow for efficiencies – whether or not that’s the basics of transactions, payments, purchase orders, etc. – all that has been neglected for a very long time for many of us.
So, automation and increased efficiency are top goals for us. We’ve spent the last six months to a year deploying a new ERP system that will consolidate our HR function, supply chain function, and financials. It should make things a lot more streamlined, reduce handoffs, and have less redundancies in the processes. It’s a short-term pain for a long-term gain. The go-live is next year, so we’ve got a little bit more work ahead of us.
In addition to technology, our next generation of clinical optimization excites me. We launched a process that further refines the value equation of outcome improvements compared to cost. We call it Precision. The goal is to build on the success of clinical variation reduction and look more holistically at care variation with the aim of improving health and reducing cost.
When you hear words like diversity and equity in the workplace, what does that mean to you, and how can they benefit an organization?
This needs to be at the forefront of most discussions. I think it’s best used to our advantage when we’re intentional about understanding it. Novant Health has done this for many years. We have used diversity and equity not as a program, but as a competitive advantage. This is the way we make decisions, by recognizing that everybody’s coming from a different place, and intentionally understanding what that means to help us make the best decisions for all parties.
Having practices to make sure I have diverse voices within my team when we’re talking about long-term planning, investing, or deciding what type of vendor we work with. Diversity and inclusion are permeated through most of the decision making we have.
It’s important to me because at the end of the day, as a woman leader, I want to be in a company that I resonate with, where I see those values as important and we continue to talk about them, and that is certainly what we do.
How do you continue to grow as a leader?
Seeing the positive even in tough times. The incredible support I’ve gotten from my team and others has shown me that as a leader, it’s important to integrate their voice into decisions, and be transparent with the things I know and the things I don’t. This has catapulted us to be a lot better and more resilient. I grow and I take a lot of comfort out of having those individual conversations with team members, understanding where everybody else is.