They can make or break your sales when dealing with a value analysis team in our current healthcare environment. The process is simple, get the VAC pack right and your chances of a sale are that much greater, get it wrong or ignore submitting a VAC pack and your chances will be seriously diminished. There is no getting around the fact that healthcare value analysis teams are requiring that you submit specific information to them in order for them to assess, evaluate, and validate that your product or service is what it should be and that all elements are there in order for them to perform this analysis. That my friends in the briefest terms is a VAC pack and the importance they have for you and your health system customers.
What’s a VAC Pack?
Used when a new vendor or a new product request is submitted, a VAC pack is a package informing a value analysis team about the new product being requested, the new product’s clinical research, and the costs associated with it. Also included should be product part numbers, pricing, and all elements needed for Supply Chain to finish due diligence on the vendor. Think of the VAC pack as a product/vendor “resume”, if you will.
But what exactly should go into these VAC packs?
The First Rule of VAC Packs: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
Just like in stand-up comedy, the first rule of VAC packs is to know your audience!
Who’s reading these things anyway? Take a step back and think about this concept for a minute. The only people in this account who know ANYTHING about our product might be a few doctors, a couple of nurses, and…us. We don’t ever want to assume ANYONE in our new VAC pack audience knows anything about us, our company, or our product.
Knowing this, the goal of our VAC pack is to allow people who are NOT our clinical champions to understand what our product does and why the health system or Ambulatory Surgery Center should consider our proposal.
However, if we write a VAC pack with only our clinical champion (say, a surgeon) in mind, the value analysis committee is lost three seconds into our document. Most VAC members don’t know the difference between subcutaneous wound closure and deep fascial closure, or a video laryngoscope from a duodenoscope. Why would we assume they do? And why should they?
Most VAC members come from different disciplines and often are businesspeople or Supply Chain, versus highly trained and well experienced doctors and nurses.
The Second Rule of VAC Packs: Start with the Problem
We want to focus on the problem the health system, hospital, or ASC faces that our product solves. We must fight the urge to talk about our product (it’s hard, I know)!
In simple terms, we should be prepared to describe the issue occurring either for the doctor, nurse, patient, or administrator and how the problem manifests. How many departments does the problem affect? Does it jeopardize patient care? Does it take up a lot of valuable staff time? Frustrate important revenue-generating surgeons?
We want the VAC members to see the problem very clearly in their mind’s eyes!
The Third Rule of VAC Packs: Tell VAC the Investment Required to Solve the Problem AND Show Our Work
The VAC team wants to understand the economics of their decision and we as vendors should be spelling those dollars and cents out in detail. Acquisition prices, service costs, disposables, estimated utilization numbers…all of it, out on the table. We make it as clear, accurate, and transparent as possible. Who wants to get a surprise bill at the end of the year? No one.
To be clear, our analysis doesn’t have to be a Harvard Business Review-level deep dive, but our calculations need to be realistic and conservative. Let’s explain the investment or acquisition price is X but the savings of time, labor, patient outcomes, etc. saves MONEY.
We will also be sure to include our appropriate codes (like ICD-10, CPT, and DRG where appropriate), HCPCs numbers, GPO status etc. to make the process easier AND credible. I know that sometimes the regulatory teams of our companies don’t like the coding being included, so we will follow our company’s policy. But whenever possible, we will include what we can to make the revenue integrity team’s job as easy as possible.
And last but not least, we should ALWAYS include our simple economic calculator used to estimate our economics so that the VAC team can check our work or calculate the problem themselves! We are hoping to be a trusted partner with these healthcare facilities, and we are adamant about letting the VAC team review the numbers to the team’s satisfaction!
The Fourth Rule of VAC Packs: Our VAC Pack Stays SIMPLE – Our Clinical Champion Goes DEEP
When speaking about clinical benefits of our product to the value analysis team, our VAC pack should educate on the level we would use for someone who’s NOT in the clinical setting. We make our messaging simple, then make it even simpler.
Now we can give our message the real stress test. We talk about our product and what it does at the dinner table with friends who aren’t in the business. Can they understand what we are describing?
Our goal is to be brief, clear, accurate, and attention-grabbing. If needed, our clinical champion can go deeper as he or she is the subject matter expert. The clinical champion is usually EXCELLENT at diving deep, because our champion lives the subject matter every day and has years of experience and knowledge.
We stay SIMPLE. Let the champions go DEEP.
The Fifth Rule of VAC Packs: Help VAC “Do the Due” Diligence
Our VAC pack should have all the essentials needed if the VAC team decides to spend more time or provisionally approve moving forward with our product. But bringing in a new vendor isn’t as simple as we in the medical device industry think the process is.
Remember when you bought your first house? Remember all the documents you needed to sign? Remember all of the background checks, home inspections, mortgage insurance, title reviews, etc.? Remember all the fun stuff?
As a new vendor, we need to be thinking the same exact way. There are several important boxes to check before we can be brought in as a trusted supplier. We should be thinking, “What would their team need to do due diligence on our company and product?”
Big Takeaway Here!
Let’s face facts, value analysis teams need our VAC packs to be accurate, well thought out, and on point on every topic of the sales and value analysis approval workflow process. If you think that a VA team is just trying to be difficult, then think again. They too are required to have all this information by their leaders and internal departments. By following these five immutable rules for VAC pack success, you will not only help yourself but your health systems with smoother, more efficient evaluations of your products you offer.
Article By:
Mark Copeland, Vice President, Sales, 3T Medical Systems, Inc.
Mark Copeland is a 28-year healthcare sales professional with the last 20 spent in startup medical device companies.
His company, 3T Medical Systems Inc, manufactures and sells innovative medical devices to health systems globally, and Mark teaches companies how to present their new product requests in a way that meets the value analysis requirements.
Contact Mark at [email protected] for more information, or visit ValueAnalysisExpert.com.
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