N.C. Hospital Doubles First-Year Supply Savings Goal, Saves $2 Million Plus With Premier’s SpendAdvisor

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--Alamance Regional Medical Center in Burlington, N.C., a member of the Premier healthcare alliance, saved more than $2 million on supplies last year, doubling its annual savings goal of $1 million, by aggressively using Premier’s widely adopted spend analytics tool, SpendAdvisor.

But even as significant as the savings are, Supply Chain Director Wendell Osborne is even more impressed by the time the groundbreaking spend management decision-support tool has saved him.

The savings are helping the 238-bed private, not-for-profit hospital better meet the growing needs of the patients it serves in Alamance County and its surrounding communities.

“As a result of implementing SpendAdvisor, we finished the year way ahead of our goal. Our savings have increased much more than we anticipated,” he said.

Osborne’s primary motivation for selecting SpendAdvisor was to gain better access to his spend data and to effectively mine that data both for savings opportunities and operations improvement.

“SpendAdvisor has saved me a ton of time. I am cutting down to a fraction of the time it used to take on projects,” the veteran purchasing executive said. “It used to take me about 20 hours to produce information that I now get out of SpendAdvisor in less than 10 minutes."

Osborne explained, “I had no way of tracking our purchases so the data mining is huge for us. The best description I can give you is before when someone told me to ‘go west,’ I’d follow the sun for contract savings. Now I have a GPS system that helps me get there. We did a pretty good job of getting there before, but now it’s a whole lot easier and takes a whole lot less time!”

Another function Osborne likes is national benchmarking, and the results have caught the attention of the medical staff. “I’m doing a lot of that for physicians,” he noted enthusiastically. “We’ve been able to tie the information from SpendAdvisor with finance and reimbursement so our physicians know what their spending habits are and how they affect the hospital.”

Osborne sent physicians information about some high-spend implant areas. “This whetted their appetite,” he noted with pride. “Now they’re calling and wanting more information. I had an orthopedic surgeon call me a couple of weeks ago. He was thinking about trying a new procedure and he wanted to know how that was going to affect the hospital as far as cost and reimbursement. As more doctors know that we now have this information available, they will call, and that’s good. Before SpendAdvisor, I did not have a way to pull this data,” he noted.

SpendAdvisor’s latest version features innovative tier qualification logic that analyzes purchasing volume, units, and market share from the past 12 months to determine automatically which tier a member will qualify for on a contract. The version also targets opportunities when the user is close to qualifying for additional savings by meeting new tier requirements as well as offers off-contract and non-contract conversion analysis, on-demand change of user preferences, and more robust data logic rules. More than 100 IDNs are on-board and successfully using SpendAdvisor, driving millions in savings.

About Alamance Regional Medical Center (ARMC)

ARMC is a 238-bed private, not-for-profit hospital, located in Burlington, N.C. The result of the first two-hospital merger in the state, ARMC continues to grow and expand, reinventing the community hospital concept. From a nationally recognized cancer center to a brand new breast care center, ARMC offers a full range of services. World class technology and expertise in imaging, cancer care, cardiology, orthopedics, and women and children's services draw the top physicians and the best and brightest caregivers.

About Premier Inc., 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient

Serving 1,700 U.S. hospitals and more than 49,000 other healthcare sites, the Premier healthcare alliance and its members are transforming healthcare together. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier operates one of the leading healthcare purchasing networks and the nation's most comprehensive repository of hospital clinical and financial information. A subsidiary operates one of the nation's largest policy-holder owned, hospital professional liability risk-retention groups. A world leader in helping healthcare providers deliver dramatic improvements in care, Premier is working with the United Kingdom's National Health Service North West and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to improve hospital performance. Headquartered in San Diego, Premier has offices in Charlotte, N.C., Philadelphia, and Washington. For more information, visit www.premierinc.com.