Healthcare Innovation for a New Year: Andy Brailo with Premier members

Andy: A highlight for me this year has been spending time with our members, getting insights from them and sharing some of that feedback with you all through this 3Q video series.

A few weeks ago, we held Premier’s Investor Day, I had the honor of interviewing several of our members. But we left so much good footage on the cutting room floor, what we decided to do with this video is use some of that footage and share some of the insights from members, including:

• Dennis Laraway, Chief Financial Officer at Banner Health;
• Kathy Carpenter, Vice President of Sourcing, Contracting and Clinical Strategy at CommonSpirit Health; and
• Robin Damschroder, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Henry Ford Health System.

So we’re going to jump right into it…

Andy: The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged all health systems to become more adaptable and resilient. If you think about your own experiences, how has the pandemic shaped your outlook and how you view the world?

Dennis: Our outlook is changing almost by the day, week and month as we continue to navigate through this crisis. Our labor markets have become strained and disrupted. We certainly can observe disruption across the supply chain ─ globally, domestically and well beyond healthcare.

Fortunately, as we look forward, we are able to capitalize on our partnership with Premier and feel more secure in how we are able to secure good and services for our patients. We are able to participate in Premier’s deep supply chain programs ─ bringing goods, supplies, pharmaceuticals to our organization at scale.

We are able to maintain accurate inventory, and within our partnership, we have been able to respond to and solve problems when disruptions arise in the supply chain. With Prestige Ameritech for N95 masks and DeRoyal for isolation gowns: these are just a few examples of how we have been able to solve problems in the supply chain, and it certainly makes all of us in the healthcare sector a bit more confident as we look forward through this pandemic and beyond.

Andy: As you look ahead, how do you anticipate the partnership between CommonSpirit and Premier will evolve to be even more successful into the future?

Kathy: We have been very successful thus far. Reducing cost at our scale is something we have been able to do together and hit those targets together. I think the way we developed our partnership to have common goals in terms of those savings targets was crucial. But we cannot continue to go to the bottom of the well over and over again and still realize all of the savings we are going to need.

So, it’s improving our purchased services spend, which is something we are about to enter in together in a very big way. Premier is helping us to figure out who we are in terms of how we need to structure our purchased services to get the value that exists in services and not just product.

The clinical insight to the data that we need to see clinically is something we are very much looking forward to with the Service Line Analytics tool to look down into our physician organization and make a difference when it comes to that clinical spend. So, we have to do things beyond product cost reduction.

Looking into domestic manufacturing and opportunities together where we can both use our scale to improve cost constantly ─ all of those things have to be what we are working with besides cost reduction. So we are very optimistic about being able to do more of that.

Andy: The partnership between Premier and Henry Ford Health System spans over three decades. What are some of the reasons we have grown stronger and kept innovating together despite facing big challenges like the pandemic?

Robin: We have grown stronger together because we both view it as a partnership. This isn’t a vendor or transaction relationship. We have members of the Premier team that are embedded with our teams, and they work with us daily. We have been deeply engaged in supporting the collaboratives that Premier drives in order to get member engagement, ideas and innovation.

I think Premier finds itself being relevant to its members because it’s looking for ways to be forward-thinking and not just producing supply cost savings. Really looking at the world being driven by data and the decisions that we make off of that ─ and how do we bring that into the workflow of the clinicians who are making decisions.

Healthcare continues to be complex, and I think Premier does its best in order to look at opportunities to reduce that complexity to get the decisions up to the forefront that are going to make a difference for each of us.

Andy: I want to thank not only our guests who were with us today, but also all our guests who have been a part of this 3Q series over the last 12-18 months. As we approach the holiday season, it’s important to be thankful – and I’m thankful to have this platform, to be able to talk to our members and get their insights.

As we look ahead, is there anything of interest that you’d like to see us cover in 3Q for the next year? And I’d also like to understand, what’s your favorite holiday song or holiday movie?

It’s a REAL simple one for me ─ Christmas in Hollis, RUN DMC. That is one I look forward to listening to every year!

Thank you all for joining us. Have a Happy Holiday season and a safe New Year!

Follow Andy on LinkedIn and check out the hashtag #3Qvideo for more of his insights and interviews on hot topics across healthcare.