CentraMed Spend combines the power of business intelligence with expert consulting services to help providers reduce supply costs and ensure that the lowest and most accurate contracted prices are being paid on an ongoing basis.
Traditionally, providers have had a difficult time tracking and analyzing their spend data due to standardization problems and the lack of good analytical solutions. In addition, supply item master issues such as inconsistent item descriptions, inconsistent vendor and manufacturer names, missing charge codes, duplicate items, blank fields, and missing items have only compounded this challenge.
Providers also experience significant price fluctuations for items from different manufacturers and vendors. This is especially true for surgical supplies when physician preference for a specific manufacturer or vendor may have a much higher cost than the same item from a different manufacturer or vendor. Hospitals that review their supply costs have noted that the quality of care measures are the same for a specific procedure, even when there is high variation in supply expense for the same procedure. Providers may also lose money when they pay more than the contractual rate for an item, or the best market price. CentraMed Spend constantly monitors spending behavior against all current vendor contracts to ensure best price purchasing.
The CentraMed Spend team first analyzes purchase orders, vendor master, item master and contract data using a cleansing process to ensure data quality. The cleansed data is then mapped to CentraMed’s reference database in order to normalize and enrich the data. The reference database is comprised of over 1 million SKUs from the most current product catalogs from all major suppliers.
Another key benefit of the data quality process is a clean and standardized item master. Through ongoing monitoring, overall data quality continues to increase over time. This is not only useful for valid spend analysis, but the item master can then be linked to the charge description master ensuring the correct price ends up on the patient’s bill. The expert management of sources, tier pricing, contracts and the linking of the item master to the charge description master will define future best practices.
The CentraMed business intelligence platform offers pre-built dashboards and reports for spend management metrics, and also allows users to create custom dashboards as well as ad hoc reports. The custom dashboard and ad hoc reporting features are user friendly and are created using simple drag and drop functions.
CentraMed Spend highlights areas for supply cost savings that will directly and meaningfully impact a provider’s bottom line. It will also allow providers to easily monitor and analyze their supply expense anomalies, and typically demonstrates a minimum of 2% to 4% in annual saving opportunities for providers – translating to a 1% to 2% improvement in net profit.
