The Catalyst … accelerating business growth in healthcare

Premier Inc (Charlotte, NC) renewed its agreement with Compression Therapy Concepts (CTC) (Eatontown, NJ) for DVT Compression products for an additional three years. The contract covers both the national agreement as well as a sole source renewal for ASCEND members. The product line was also expanded to include environmentally friendly garments. CTC is the only company in this category of products to receive Practice Greenhealth Certification.

MELINDA MCDONALD JOINS ESSENTIAL HEALTHCARE MANAGEMENT

Essential Healthcare Management (EHM) has announced that healthcare industry veteran Melinda McDonald has joined EHM as Senior Vice President. Most recently, Melinda was Vice President, Non-Clinical Products and Services for Children’s Hospital Association, formerly Child Health Corporation of America (CHCA).  In that role, she managed a portfolio of over 100 agreements representing over $40M in spend.  Melinda was instrumental in starting and developing this role at CHCA. Savings in one year for the hospital participants was close to $6M.  In addition to managing the portfolio of agreements, Melinda also developed new suppliers, assisted them in working with hospitals and increased their revenues. She has an outstanding reputation with suppliers and helping them to succeed.

“We are very happy to add to our growing company, a person of such great experience, skill and professionalism as Melinda.  She will bring real world contracting experience to her role representing suppliers, specifically in the purchased services area, which is growing in visibility to the contracting world.  We look forward to a very productive relationship with Ms. McDonald and welcome her aboard,” EHM Managing Partner Stan Schroeder commented.

Prior to her work with the CHCA Group Purchasing Services division, Melinda was responsible for the Executive Institute.  The Executive Institute was a membership organization with CHCA comprised of CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and CNOs.  Her responsibilities included formulating a yearly business plan for the Executive Institute, planning and facilitating three meetings per year for the CEOs, coordinating deliverables and projects for the Executive Institute, and marketing and selling the Executive Institute for renewals every year.

Melinda also held a position at Saint Luke’s Health System in Kansas City, Missouri.  She was instrumental in the development of a Women’s Heart Center, as well as various programming for women.  Melinda’s other responsibilities included developing advertising campaigns for print, radio and television, as well as handling team and event sponsorships.  She also worked with the team charged with purchasing physician practices.

Melinda began her career with Xerox Corporation.  Her last assignment was an account executive handling transportation and advertising agencies.  She attended the Xerox sales school, as well as other sales and account management training programs.

In her new role at EHM, McDonald will be responsible for creating and developing national accounts programs for EHM clients, specializing in the purchased services area.

Melinda received her Bachelor of Business Administration from Georgia Southern University and her MBA from the University of Kansas.

Recently, EHM was tapped by Uresil, LLC to lead the company's national corporate accounts strategy.  Uresil is a medical supplier developing, manufacturing and distributing products that serve the needs of physicians who perform minimally invasive procedures.  Since 1986, the company has produced high-quality, unique, medical products for use in interventional radiology and vascular procedures.

“As healthcare treatments continue to trend toward cost efficiency, Uresil will continue to lead competitors with breakthrough products and a centralized production model,” said EHM founder and managing partner Frank Ripullo.  “At EHM, we share the same innovative spirit that drives Uresil. We look forward to continuing to work with Uresil on their national accounts strategy.”

With new federal regulations changing the healthcare landscape, EHM is growing into a thought leader and educating clients on how the changes affect their business development prospects. EHM guides clients through the procurement process and helps companies present their offerings to key decision-makers and target audiences.

For more information on how EHM is helping Uresil, please read our press release.

In our final installment on the virtues of the outsourcing model, we examine the third factor you should consider when evaluating whether outsourcing could improve the productivity and financial climate of your company. Robert Ryan’s position paper on the topic of outsourcing posited that restructuring how companies utilize their human capital, or, in other words, their workforce in-house and elsewhere, will affect how profitable they will be in the future. Ryan suggests that by increasing a company’s agility, or the speed at which they are able to adapt, it will be more likely to weather the many changes to come in the business world.

We have already examined how capacity and capability can affect a company’s decision to outsource. Culture ranks as the third factor that should be considered before making the leap to outsourcing. As Ryan asks, “Do the current organizational norms and values support the development and implementation of the strategy?”

While culture can also refer to the acceptability of this practice in a certain office, it also relates to the acceptability of outsourcing in a particular industry. Ryan points to technology as an industry particularly well-suited to outsourcing. “Competition for specialized technological expertise is found on the world market,” he writes. “With the rise of efficient collaboration capabilities, services can be found in many emerging countries of the world…. Because of technology improvements, work groups can all be brought into our living rooms.”

The health care industry also offers a culture that allows for ad hoc collaboration to fill any gaps in capacity and capability that may exist in one company. Here at EHM we not only serve as the link to connecting health care suppliers with the group purchasing organizations (GPOs), accountable care organizations (ACOs) and integrated delivery networks (IDNs), but we can also handle all of your marketing, advertising and selling needs for you. If you need help determining if these options are right for you, contact us, and we can talk you through the entire process and answer any questions that you have.

Over the past two weeks, we have begun to examine the outsourcing model and how to determine if it is right for your company. Over the past decade, outsourcing has become more of a reality than ever before thanks to technological advances that allow people to work together no matter where their office is.

Last week, diminished staff capacity in light of the economic downturn was discussed. Capability serves as the counterpart to capacity. Without the optimal staff capacity a company has become accustomed to, its capability surely will be diminished as well. And from there, performance may begin to decline as a result. This is what all companies hope to avoid in the face of layoffs. As fewer employees take on more work, quality begins to suffer, and previously handled tasks begin to fall down the cracks.

The leading causes of a decline in capability will be the loss of institutional experience, knowledge, special skills and historical competencies. In addition to layoffs because of economic constraints, the generational shift in the workforce likely will also contribute to diminished capability. Because younger workers are likely to work at five to six times as many companies as their older counterparts, their own general business acumen is likely to suffer as well. Instead, these workers will only have the time to learn the one aspect of the company they are involved in as opposed to receiving the institutional, years-long education of how an organization runs that their parents did. As Robert Ryan states in his position paper on outsourcing, “The generational trend is toward specialization, further diluting the general business cognition.”

With layoffs and the generational shift of the workforce, companies will begin to see gaps in their capabilities. That is where outsourcing comes in. How have you used outsourcing to fill capability gaps?

In Robert Ryan’s recent position paper on the topic, he repeatedly refers to a need to make companies agile, which better allows for course corrections in times of rapid change, like now. When it comes to agility, size will always be a factor, no matter if it is comparing the way a sports car whips around corners in comparison to the much larger minivan or in seeing how small companies can make changes much more simply than larger ones. In fact, the workforce itself is becoming more agile, with the average Baby Boomer expected to work for only two to three companies throughout his or her career, while members of generations X and millennium will likely average 15-18 tenures at different companies.

When capacity shrinks, a company may no longer have the size of the workforce necessary to handle all tasks and strategies. With a smaller capacity, organizations begin to struggle with completing the functions they completed prior to the downsizing, much less be able to actually keep up with technological advances and changes in the industry. Once a company reaches a point where it can no longer keep pace with its competitors, then it is no longer agile.

Also, as the number of employees of many businesses has dwindled down to a core staff as a result of the economic downswing, many people are now doing multiple jobs, and with more people changing jobs at different companies than ever before, it makes sense that workers are no longer perfectly suited and trained for every aspect of their positions. Rather than allow quality and service to deteriorate in the wake of this situation, it makes more and more sense for companies to carefully examine the capacity of their workforce in terms of not only numbers but also capabilities, which we will discuss in more depth next week.

As Ryan states, “Too expensive to hire and train, most organizations acquire expertise episodically for strategic initiatives. This includes increasing capability and capacity over a short, definable period of business or technical transition.” How have you seen capacity make a difference when a company is considering outsourcing? How do you determine which functions your team can handle in-house and which can be outsourced? How do you determine when a company should take on added capacity to achieve a goal?

With fuel costs rising almost daily, the purse strings on company travel budgets continue to be drawn tighter and tighter. In fact, some companies have eliminated travel entirely in favor of outsourcing the sales, advertising and marketing work that once required separate departments.

The outsourcing model offers a way for company’s to maximize limited resources in a time of economic constraint. As a cost-saving tool, outsourcing allows the same work to be done by a strategic partner for a fraction of the price that it would cost to be done in-house.

Robert Ryan, Co-founder and Vice President of TrustedCare, Inc. in Austin, TX, recently delved into the outsourcing model in a position paper. In it, he referred to ways to make your company more “agile” - and agility is actually what all companies should be striving for. Ryan states, “Because change is constant, the agile enterprise is able to adroitly adjust to and take advantage of rising opportunities…. It is apparent in studies that the agile organization shows significant profit growth…”

EHM has built a business based on connecting medical suppliers to the healthcare organizations with purchasing power, but the company also offers its clients much more in the form of outsourced sales, advertising and marketing support. As an EHM client, we can use our resources and connections to sell your products directly to the Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs), Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) who most need access to them.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be examining some questions that will you help you determine if the outsourcing model, and a partnership with EHM, is right for you, so stay tuned to the EHM Catalyst Blog each week.

In the meantime, please tell us whether you have examined if outsourcing is right for your organization. There are pros and cons to both models, and we are interested to hear your end result.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (Washington, DC) released regulations on accountable care organizations (ACOs), providing rules to enable organizations in setting up exchanges of healthcare data to improve care and reduce costs, as mandated under the Accountable Care Act. A press release was distributed at the end of March detailing the announcement and includes links to the specific regulations.

ACOs are pivotal to the federal government's plan to reduce healthcare costs and improve quality. Some providers, such as Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City, UT), have been using an approach that's something similar to ACOs for years. Collaborations between doctors and other providers make care more uniform, based on the best outcomes. Often, this care is also the most cost-effective. Some have called ACOs the HMOs of today.

EHM has the experience and knowledge to help guide suppliers through this new market structure.  We can provide product marketing and positioning support, make appropriate introductions and get you in front of the right decision-makers to help make you more successful.

TruthPoint Helps Hospitals Improve Patient Satisfaction Scores

EHM prides itself on connecting valuable medical industry suppliers with those who have purchasing power. Our latest client that we are positioning for success is TruthPoint, which offers an innovative method of helping hospitals dramatically improve their patient experience scores. With this technology in place, TruthPoint can greatly assist Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) with meeting their own goals when it comes to patient satisfaction.

ACOs will likely become the predominant option for integrating healthcare services for Medicare recipients beginning in January 2012, and EHM aims to ease the way for medical industry suppliers to align their missions to this new system. As the number of registered ACOs continues to skyrocket, EHM is focusing on helping its clients become as marketable as possible to these new organizations and their potential purchasing power. One of the primary ways this can be achieved is by helping clients create services that will appeal across a broad range of healthcare spectrums.

Having accurate and easy-to-procure patient experience scores can eliminate a large burden from hospitals. By relying on TruthPoint, healthcare providers will be able to spend less time obtaining their own figures and more time using the figures from TruthPoint to strategize on how best to serve their patients and strengthen their financial results. TruthPoint’s system is so easy for patients to use that hospitals can implement it at every point of care throughout their system to get a wide-ranging array of results.

For more information on TruthPoint or EHM, please contact EHM.