Piedmont Healthcare’s award-winning Supply Chain team credits a number of suppliers as helping them achieve success as quickly as their organization expands its number of facilities and services. Amy Chieppa, Executive Director of Integration, Performance and Systems, calls out three worth noting upfront.
Data
“GHX [is] key in our vendor, data and transaction management,” Chieppa told Healthcare Purchasing News. “GHX is integral to our data management strategy. The key tool for this is Nuvia, [which] not only is used as an item cleansing tool but integral in M&A activity, physical inventories and identifying/untangling contract connections from a data perspective. They are also the source of truth for our UNSPSC code assignments that ties items to our GL so we can identify savings and validate savings to the GL, department and account level.
“As a business partner, they work with us on product enhancement and development ideas and process problems,” Chieppa continued. “They are key to all M&A activity form data normalization to EDI to Vendormate/Vendor Credentialing conversions. They are invested in the relationship and work with us to understand our vision around data management its future yet to be defined, all the while accepting that it often means they have to listen to what their tools ‘don’t do’ for us.”
Research
“HBI [serves as a] resource of information and research on topics, partner in developing and deploying training material,” she said. “HBI is partnering with us to create material from scratch for our department – business understanding, process and clicks in technology. They are doing a lot of heavy lifting within the scope and budget with a path and to a degree that we have not been able to achieve with any other company. With all the growth Piedmont is experiencing, the value of what they are producing goes far beyond the delivered material.”
Group Purchasing/Performance Improvement
“Vizient [is] our GPO, and [provides] consultant resources for clinical operation improvement and PPI initiatives,” she noted. “As much as we providers relate to each other in terms of the effort and work related to M&A activity, the GPO is a critical partner in this process as well. Our on-site, dedicated Associate Vice President of Enterprise Clients, Tim Murray, has led the coordination efforts such as contract connections, price parity, and location rostering, all the while working within/between the Medassets and Vizient contracts while converting to the new, combined Vizient contracts. M&A timelines have been as short as 9 months or even shorter with a ‘big bang’ [where] Piedmont acquires and implements GPO and systems on day one. In addition, their consulting resources have partnered with us on a number of projects not only delivering savings targets, but also respecting to the details of how we manage our data across all of our systems and maneuvering the disparate data and processes of our new acquisitions.”
