Sponsored: Premier Health- December 2023- The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Increased labor costs (46 percent) and labor availability (39 percent) are among the top overall operational/financial concerns
for U.S. healthcare providers – with 1 in 4 calling these the largest risk factors for healthcare supply chains over the next year, according to Premier’s 2023 Resiliency survey.
Increasingly, healthcare supply chain teams are working to automate highly repeatable, manual and burdensome processes for greater efficiency, boosted productivity and cost savings.
What’s taking up the most time? What’s tedious, inefficient and most frustrating for our staff and teams? We don’t want to devote valuable resources to clicking the same things over and over again.
One key area ripe for automation is contract activations.
Research suggests that the average hospital has more than 1,200 group purchasing organization (GPO) and local contracts in its portfolio and activates contract pricing for more than 40,000 new line items every six months.
With a large volume of contracts, frequency of updates and changes, and new activations and additional contracts executed to cover new products, transforming this traditionally time-consuming, cumbersome process can deliver significant operational and financial benefits for healthcare organizations.
Enter AI-enabled robotic process automation.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology that can emulate human actions interacting with digital systems and software.
RPA can do repetitive and lower-value work, like logging into applications and systems, moving files and folders, extracting, copying and inserting data, filling in forms, and completing routine analyses and reports. When coupled with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems, RPA can expand its ability to handle cognitive processes like understanding documents with semi-structured or unstructured data.
Trusted, best-in-class RPA solutions can help activate GPO contracts quickly and efficiently – acting as a digital employee to go through the tedious steps of repeatedly activating new contracts. This type of tool has the flexibility to include and automate contract tier information, comments and price, effective date for all activations, as well as choosing to move distributors, and adding a final approval if desired.
Reaping the benefits of RPA.
One large health system leveraged Premier’s Nexera supply chain consulting arm and its RPA tool to activate more than 800 contracts and save more than 30 hours of manual data entry. Since the health system started using this tool, the team has been able to reduce the time needed to activate new contracts by 95 percent.
This solution is enabling contract stakeholders to automate what has historically been a highly manual process, helping to drive rapid synchronization, accuracy and employee satisfaction.
A complex and often untapped area for modernization, a now heightened sense of urgency around contract activations and management exists due to the costs and inefficiencies it adds for providers – and to healthcare overall.
Accurate contracts and pricing mean more cost-effective healthcare.
Healthcare providers also require innovative solutions to fill today’s labor gap and enable the next generation of the supply chain workforce.
And when AI-enabled technology can tackle these types of repetitive, high-volume tasks, humans are freed to focus on the things they do best and enjoy more – innovating, collaborating, creating and pursuing high-impact work. Organizations, in turn, are rewarded with higher productivity, efficiencies, cost savings and resilience.