HEAVY METTLE. Now more than 30 days after the Winter Games in Turin/Torino, Italy (and nary a mention of the Shroud, NBC?) you might be suffering from enough painful Olympic withdrawal symptoms that would rival the anguish of American slope dope Bode Miller as an ardent disciple of Frances Willard. So to satisfy the desires of you medal ceremony aficionados allow us to grant some gold, silver and bronze bling to some key non-manufacturer players positioning themselves for a banner future. In the category of most intriguing maneuvers in the healthcare supply chain, middlemen class…

Give the gold to MedAssets Inc. for its assembly of acquisitions and product/service rollouts within the last 18 to 24 months emphasizing billing compliance, data integrity and revenue cycle management. Historically, these represent foreign specialties offered by a group purchasing organization even though GPOs and distributors alike began earnestly talking about them as a necessary survival tactic a decade ago during the days when the soon-to-bomb EHCR(Efficient Healthcare Consumer Response) initiative and dot-coms threatened to "disintermediate" them. Roping in companies like Med-Data Management, Inobis and Avega Health Systems, as well as launching its catchy-named CrossWalk software system, designed to help facilities improve margins and cash flow, clearly demonstrates the GPO’s commitment to the left side of the balance sheet and not just the traditional right side. Equate it to the figure skater completing the quadruple axel followed by the triple lutz and then triple salchow.

Give the silver to Owens & Minor Inc. for bolstering its own information technology offerings with the acquisition of scrappy Perigon and its user-friendly supply chain software system, along with amassing a brain trust of supply chain intelligence in its OMSolutions group, including (but certainly not limited to) such familiar names as Mark Van Sumeren, Michael Rudomin, Jamie Kowalski and Carl Natenstedt. As other vendors shed or spin off the consulting units they acquired in the late 1990s, Owens & Minor seems to have a trick up its sleeve. Either it’s woefully playing catch-up with an oh-so-15-minutes ago strategy or it’s up to something big. Bet on the latter.

The "revamping" Health Industry Group Purchasing Association grabs the bronze by unveiling an intriguing maneuver to split into two entities – one that emphasizes the traditional group purchasing "buy side" (read, GPOs and IDNs) and the other that focuses on the "sell side." While only providers will qualify to become official HIGPA members, manufacturers and distributors can become non-voting affiliate members, thereby erasing, if not cloaking, the "ambiguous signal" picked up by legislators and regulators. Starting in 2007, vendors will be invited to help establish a "Supply Chain Institute" for education, research and benchmarking activities (ruh-roh!), according to HIGPA. Furthermore, HIGPA agreed to hire Washington, DC-based Capital Health Group as its lobbyist to the government. Michael Bromberg, formerly the CEO of the Federation of American Health Systems (which has since reverted to its pre-Clinton healthcare reform years name of "Hospitals") that represents investor-owned hospital chains, heads the firm. Certainly Bromberg represents a departure from and a different style than Robert Betz, with whom HIGPA chose not to renew its contract for executive director. While these decisions represent a fundamental shift in philosophy and a turn in the right direction the real question is whether they go far enough to remove those so-called ambiguities and send a clear enough signal about HIGPA’s future and GPOs’ value to the healthcare industry. Time will tell. One wonders how events would have transpired had Betz suggested these changes five or 10 years ago. Or whether the powers-that-be really would have listened and acted on them. Then again, without the legislative and regulatory turmoil HIGPA and several prominent GPOs experienced in the last five years would there have been any push to change?

MINTY FRESH. Who says Hollywood doesn’t learn anything from the medical profession (even with all the medical shows over the years)? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly magazine, actor Mark Harmon discussed his variety of television series roles, including stints as a doctor on two medical dramas – NBC’s "St. Elsewhere" in the 1980s and CBS’ "Chicago Hope in the late 1990s. Harmon gleefully shared some medical intelligence he learned on the "Chicago Hope" set. "I learned never to eat an Altoid before putting on a surgical mask. You’ll go blind from the vapors." Sounds like fodder for potential medical/surgical errors. Count this important tip as just another nugget of helpful advice from your friends at Healthcare Purchasing News.