Tech-Enabling the Healthcare Supply Chain to Ensure Resiliency and Margin Improvement

Year after year, healthcare providers and suppliers find themselves confronted by a decades-old problem: eliminating waste and reducing cost in the healthcare supply chain. And with supply chain being the second largest cost driver for health systems just behind labor, it’s time that the healthcare industry attacks the problem head on. Through our growing technology portfolio, Premier is doing just that.

Managing Drug Costs with Digital Technologies

Our new partnership with Chronicled, Inc., the San Francisco-based technology company behind the Mediledger Network, brings opportunities for better transparency and collaboration among all of the players in the pharmaceutical supply chain. The Mediledger Network – including major pharmacy wholesalers and several Premier-contracted pharmacy suppliers – serves as a “common source of truth” for pharmacy contracts, products and pricing.

Without a shared, central repository – where all parties involved have visibility to and usage of the same contracting and pricing data – misalignments and errors in the pharmaceutical supply chain remain hidden, resulting in inaccurate pharmaceutical chargebacks. The intricacies of these chargebacks can be quite complex, and with such complexity comes a cost to the pharmaceutical supply chain in terms of both dollars and administrative time to work through them. One of the key contributors to the slowness of this process are the details needed to identify which facilities were involved in the purchase transactions.

Manufacturers want to know they’re being paid what they’re owed, and wholesalers need to ensure they’re not overpaying – all while the group purchasing organization (GPO) is working to validate that its members are getting value from GPO contracts with correct pricing. Making the pharmacy wholesaler/manufacturer chargeback process and associated business processes less costly and more efficient is our goal with Mediledger.

Source: Chronicled

With Mediledger, Premier pharmacy members benefit from improved coordination among Premier-contracted pharmacy suppliers and distributors, enabling more accurate pricing, reduced add-bills and a simplified procurement process. Pharmacy suppliers and distributor partners in the network have access to a pre-validated GPO roster and can expect to see reductions in the time necessary to resolve disputes, revenue leakage and pricing errors, as well as the elimination of unnecessary re-bills.

Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Automation to Curb Healthcare Waste and Errors

In addition to bolstering pharmaceutical supply chain processes with technology, Premier has made investments to tech-enable the paper-based, error-prone invoicing and payment processes still used by far too many healthcare suppliers and providers.

PINC AI™ data (as of February 2021) shows that nearly $40 billion in waste and inefficiencies in healthcare is tied to invoicing alone. Furthermore, the data indicates that between $4-6 billion in erroneous payments is tied to invoicing errors for current contracts with accurate price activations. These errors bog down the procure-to-pay process, creating payment delays for suppliers and unnecessary administrative work for providers, among other challenges.

Remitra™, our new e-invoicing and e-payables platform, helps solve these problems for suppliers and providers by creating a digitized, end-to-end workflow that is designed to reduce overall cost, cut down on errors and optimize efficiencies on both sides of the healthcare supply chain – from contracting all the way through to payment, helping ensure every invoice is accurate.

Source: Premier, IDS LLC

Remitra™ is designed to enable suppliers and providers to conduct business on a single, common platform – regardless of enterprise resource planning (ERP) system type or GPO affiliation – standardizing supply chain data flow between both parties.

Suppliers can easily keep their pricing data up to date and transparent which, in turn, enables providers to keep their item masters up to date and clean. Contracts are seamlessly connected to invoices, helping to eliminate invoicing errors that result in costly match exceptions, which occur when a supplier’s invoice doesn’t match a provider’s purchase order.

Healing Healthcare’s Biggest Challenges, One Technology at a Time

Premier is actively driving many initiatives aimed at reducing healthcare supply chain waste and removing costs. Solving this decades-old problem requires bold, new approaches that are data- and analytics-driven and fueled by technology. We are thrilled that Premier can team up with strategic, progressive-thinking partners like Chronicled as well as continue to invest in technology solutions like the Remitra™ platform.

Here’s to driving the healthcare supply chain forward in 2022 and beyond.

For more:

• Explore our comprehensive, industry-leading pharmacy programs and solutions.
• Learn more about the benefits the Remitra™ procure-to-pay automation has to offer healthcare providers and suppliers.
• To learn more about our Chronicled partnership and other supply chain technology solutions, Premier members can contact Chad Connelly.

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