Director of Strategic Sourcing, Intermountain Health
April 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Sasha Magee grew up around doctors and observed a variety of hospitals and doctors’ offices during her childhood. Her father is a retired child neurologist and served in the Air Force.
“Listening to him over the years, it always stood out to me how big of an impact the operations of a hospital had on his ability to provide care,” said Magee, Director of Strategic Sourcing for Intermountain Health. “Tackling some of those issues from a contracts and supply chain position has been a really rewarding challenge for me. I know that the work that my team does positively impacts the organization, and in turn supports the care that our clinicians provide to their patients.”
Magee’s dad and her maternal grandfather were both immigrants to the United States. “Seeing everything that they overcame makes me work hard to honor those challenges and sacrifices and to be a better version of myself every day,” she said. “I am always competing with myself – setting new goals to beat and taking on new challenges.”
As a leader, showing up for her team also keeps Magee motivated and energized. “Work is such a large part of our waking life, and making sure my team feels engaged, valued, and invested in is a huge priority for me. I’ve been fortunate to have amazing leaders who have invested in and shown up for me, especially at Intermountain. I hope to live up to that example by paying that forward.”
As Director of Strategic Sourcing for Intermountain Health, Magee leads a team of sourcing specialists who have responsibility for running competitive events, such as RFPs, and the drafting and negotiation of supply chain contracts. They are responsible for a wide range of contract types – products, services, SaaS and software licenses, construction, equipment, sponsorships, distribution, and pharmacy. As Director, Magee leads the training and development of the team across categories, develops their sourcing methodology, and provides strategy and support for the team’s projects. She also led the integration and change management efforts as they combined two different teams through 2022 and 2023, which “was a fun and unique challenge,” she said.
“I am actually changing roles at the moment,” she said. “After a decade in strategic sourcing, largely in healthcare, I am excited to have the opportunity to transition to the role of Director of Category Management over Pharmacy, and Non-Acute Direct Spend, and get to use my skills and experience in a different space.”
Magee is excited about launching a more agile contract strategy, utilizing a modular and customizable approach to their contracts instead of the classic standard contract template. This will support improved speed to contracting as well as stronger terms that better reflect the range of needs across categories. “I’ve also developed master classes in contract drafting and competitive events for the team,” she said. “These master classes help baseline skills across the team, provide reference materials, and help the team connect their work to other departments so they understand those interdependencies. The drafting masterclass leverages my legal background and helps my team incorporate drafting best practices that I’ve taught to law students. In this way, the team is drafting crisp, structurally sound language to back up the concepts being negotiated without needing an attorney or paralegal to do that level of work.”
Today’s stress points and tomorrow’s success
Post-pandemic, supply chain teams struggled with high inflation and suppliers raising pricing due to raw material shortage, transportation issues, and other disruptions in their supply chain. As we move into 2024, those factors have settled down, “but many suppliers are still leaning on those excuses to try to increase or maintain high prices,” said Magee. “We are negotiating aggressively and identifying areas where we can put pressure on suppliers, especially those posting favorable profits.”
Hospitals and health systems are also seeing rapid innovation in the marketplace through AI. Identifying where to invest time, money and resources to stay competitive while still tackling the day-to-day operations will be a challenge for many supply chain teams.
Finally, Magee believes a key to future success will involve supply chain teams looking inward. Where is there waste in their processes, policies, systems, and standard work? How can they drive efficiency without sacrificing quality? What is the return on investment for their daily work? “How can we collaborate more successfully across functions and departments to tackle challenges?”
Today’s supply chain teams need leaders who can drive alignment cross-functionally, who can champion the work supply chain does, and facilitate communication and understanding between supply chain teams and their internal partners. They also need leaders who understand non-pricing value – such as supply chain resiliency, risk mitigation, and total cost of ownership. “There are a lot of hidden costs in supply chain that aren’t captured in a simple savings calculation,” Magee said. “While pricing will always be important, we have to address the hidden costs that are consuming resources as well.”