Healthcare Cost Solutions, LLC

Healthcare Cost Solutions has deep experience in all types of contracting, including supplies, equipment and purchased services.  Through the use of state-of-the-art ERP and Materials Management Information Systems in concert with information provided by GPOs, hospitals and health systems have been reasonably successful at improving the proportion of supplies covered under formal contracts. 

At the same time, the impact of spend for purchased services often equals or exceeds that of supplies.  Information about these expenditures is often limited to what is on vendor invoices.  It is frequently difficult to even determine which services are under contract and which are not.  It is common for supply chain management staff to have difficulty even locating copies of these contracts.  Historically, responsibility for purchased services contracting has been very decentralized (i.e. relegated to various department heads) and handled by widely varying degrees of experience and expertise in contracting.  More of than not, when these contracts come up for renewal, they are a low priority until there is no time to seek competitive proposals, and thus the contract is simply renewed with the incumbent vendor without formal comparison to current market conditions, alternative service providers, and/or aggressive negotiations.

We have a process and database application that allows us to first rank relative spend by purchased services vendor, and then starting with those whcih are most impacting, systematically collect information about each existing agreement and establish action steps, priorities and a timeline for rigorous review and revision of current agreements.