“Flatten the curve” has become the mantra of Covid-19 response resulting in stay-at-home advisories excluding essential travel, social distancing, and postponing elective surgeries.
What can be done virtually in the meantime in the ASC or surgical hospital setting in the absence of elective surgeries and a majority of society working remotely?
For one, surgeons, administrators, and their management company partners can use the new-found bandwidth to focus on reanalyzing their procurement and supply chain habits and contracts.
Fewer procedures performed means less revenue generated for each facility, catapulting the importance of case profitability (while still maintaining quality as the number one priority). With reimbursements locked in place, lowering the cost of implants and supplies used in surgeries is the most effective and immediate method to boost margins.
- Have you price benchmarked every unique implant and supply in use at your facilities?
- Have you engaged vendors to negotiate fair market pricing for implants and supplies that have identical alternatives sold for lower prices by other vendors?
If there is one thing that has been apparent in this new Covid-19 pandemic, it’s that the healthcare supply chain is exposed.
- Do you know the country of manufacturing origin of each of the implants and supplies on which you depend?
- Do you know the specific implants and supplies to switch to in the event of a backorder for each of the products you use?
Lastly, many facilities use thousands of unique products each year in thousands of surgeries. Making sense of all of this data can be time-consuming, burdensome, and it often requires the assistance of outside help.
- Do you have procedure cost analytics to identify facility, physician, and vendor cost outliers?
- Can you quantify and rank the financial impact that price-corrective actions can make?
If you answered no to any of the above questions you are not alone. We uncovered that many administrators and the majority of surgeons lack the tools to scalably analyze procurement efforts at their facilities. It’s why we built Relatable - to offer surgeons and administrators easy to use software to analyze and address cost-outliers in their business without impacting care.
When the time is right, send us an email or schedule a demo through our website and we’ll show you how you can position your facility for increased profitability in advance of the anticipated surge in demand for elective surgeries post Covid-19.
And let’s #flattenthecurve.
