Executive Director of Supply Chain
and Materials Distribution,
Kettering Health
August 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Trisha Gillum, Executive Director of Supply Chain and Materials Distribution, has extensive experience in health care finance and operations, including roles in general accounting, decision support, third party contract management, revenue cycle management, and perioperative operations management.
Please tell us a little bit about your role and responsibilities.
I’m Kettering Health’s executive for Supply Chain management, which includes value analysis, product sourcing, contracting, the MMIS system, purchasing, and operations. On the operations side, that includes receiving, inventory management, courier services, linens, and our in-house print shop. I also manage acute and non-acute spend.
Any recent stories of wins/successful Supply Chain projects you can share?
I’m excited by our recent success in the PPI, or physician preference items. We’ve been working with our physicians to standardize product selection, driving towards one or two primary vendors, with limited access to niche products as needed, for patient care. Pursuing this will drive significant financial benefits, as well as operation benefits, by limiting the number of vendors with products on site and the number of systems our clinical teams need to know.
One of our most successful examples was our spinal implants: We were able to go from about 18 vendors to two primary vendors. These changes really allow us to pick our partners and focus on clinical expertise.
What about upcoming initiatives you are excited to be working on?
We recently converted our group purchasing organization to Vizient, and we’re looking to optimize opportunities through that platform. Moving to Vizient was a year-long process, where we really assessed where we wanted to go and completed an implementation and initial conversion earlier this year. With this in place, we can focus on taking advantage of what they have to offer.
And we are always looking at operational efficiencies, assessing practices across our operations.
How do you measure the success of your team and its impact on the organization as a whole?
Kettering Health monitors the success of individual cost initiatives, but we do also look at the overall supply spend of the system as a whole. We work very closely with our clinical and quality teams to monitor clinical performance and how our supplies impact overall patient quality.
What’s the biggest takeaway for you as a supply chain leader over the last few years of marketplace disruptions?
Be flexible, be flexible, be flexible! Maintaining good relations with our clinical team allows us to partner together to be flexible around what we can get and what we can use.
Adaptability has been a keyword during these times of disruption. I’ve learned that understanding what the needs are, where the critical needs are, and how we create risk strategies to minimize failure points in those critical needs is paramount.
What are the keys to a successful provider/supplier relationship?
Open and honest communication is so important for me. When I think back to the most successful projects and most successful relations, they were really built around knowing that we’re functioning as a team where we can express needs, concerns, and issues. And our providers and suppliers kept us informed of any issues and needs they had. We worked to create a win-win environment where we could both be successful.
When a vendor lets me know something isn’t working as expected, it allows me to assure our team that a fix is in place and we can move forward. I really value transparency from our vendors.
About Kettering Health
As a faith-based, nonprofit health system, Kettering Health strives to improve the lives of people in the communities it serves through healthcare and education. Kettering Health is made up of 14 medical centers and more than 120 outpatient locations throughout western Ohio, as well as Kettering Health Medical Group – with more than 700 board-certified providers dedicated to elevating the health, healing, and hope of the community. Kettering College, a division of Kettering Health Main Campus, is a fully accredited college that specializes in health science education.
For more, visit ketteringhealth.org.