Is Your Hospital Overpaying?
When your hospital takes a SMART approach to benchmarking, you’ll get better results and save money.
By SMART, I mean:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timebound
Benchmarking ensures your hospital isn’t overpaying for the items in your outsourced agreements.
The advice we give hospitals is:
You can’t benchmark if you have general or ratio benchmarking.
Don’t benchmark based on aggregate numbers, or bed size, or outpatient revenue.
You can’t benchmark based on another hospital’s service based on bed size.
You won’t get results or improve your margins by doing this.
We tell all our hospitals to be SMART with their benchmarking.
At VIE Healthcare, we go beyond in benchmarking by incorporating data analytics, utilization and contract reviews.
We benchmark details from multiple sources including GPOs across the country and including regionalized benchmarking.
Benchmarking market standards for pricing and contract terms can be difficult without access to an extensive resource of peer pricing data.
Before benchmarking, we recommend reviewing the details in your invoices to reveal utilization trends.
Gaining access to the line item details saves your hospital money.
In summary:
- Don’t spot check or review the last three months.
- You must have a comprehensive view of what real utilization was in your hospital.
- If you benchmark from contract alone, you will miss significant cost savings.
At VIE Healthcare®, we see benchmarking as the average, the norm.
We constantly innovate to exceed those industry norms and save our hospitals money.
My advice is to review all of your professional services fees and hourly rates and get them benchmarked.
It’s a great way to start with a big cost savings win in benchmarking.
Don’t forget, your vendor agreements can be renegotiated at any time, in or out of term.
Having a SMART benchmarking system in place will help your hospital to achieve its cost savings goals.
Reach out at lmiller@spendmend.com to discuss your cost savings goals and how we can support and accelerate cost savings opportunities in your organization.
