It is our opinion that a wealth of untapped knowledge and expertise exists within your supplier organizations, but isn’t being regularly tapped into by value analysis professionals in a systematic way. If only value analysis practitioners would consider their suppliers as Value Analysis Advisors™ they would find that their supplier resources can make their value analysis job much easier.
Thousands of Products to be Evaluated, Not Enough Time
Think about it for a moment, there are thousands of products that need to be monitored, tracked, and evaluated at your healthcare organization. How are you going to find time to do so? It makes sense to tap into your supply networks to conduct value analysis studies to help you to lower your healthcare organization’s costs and improve quality in this age of doing more with less.
One such supplier driven value analysis study comes to mind when a client of ours asked their I.V. set supplier to conduct a value analysis study to determine why they were spending almost 22% more annually on their I.V. sets than their peers. After an extensive value analysis study, the supplier’s experts concluded that the hospital’s: (i) restart rate was 42% higher than their peers’, and (ii) the hospital’s nursing staff were changing the I.V. sets every 36 hours vs. 48–72 hours (community standard). From this information the hospital realized that they were not using date and time labels on their I.V. sets, which was the root cause of this problem. After changing this behavior, the hospital saved $93,296 annually without doing any of the heavy lifting.
Imagine Having More Hours In the Day
By delegating many of your value analysis studies to your current or potential suppliers you will have more time to: (1) Perform high level value analysis studies (e.g., pacemakers, orthopedics, spinal, etc.) that only you can do. (2) Triple or even quadruple the output (e.g., savings and quality improvements) of your value analysis projects – almost overnight. (3) Obtain answers to your department heads and managers’ product or service concerns in a timely fashion.
As you can see, by tapping into your suppliers’ networks you can greatly expand the impact of your value analysis program at your healthcare organization.
Consider This Time Saving Idea
I know that some healthcare organizations believe that value analysis is an internal process, but who says you can’t utilize your suppliers to speed up, simplify, and even improve your value analysis studies. The alternative is to see your value analysis studies continue to take six months to a year to complete, if they are even completed at all.
