Vizient-led Power Huddles

VIZIENT-LED power huddles

Key insights from Vizient Connections Summit sessions

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Vizient Assurance: Collaborating to Mitigate Risk and Improve Access

Kevin Johns, Senior Director, Supply Assurance, Vizient; Mittal Sutaria, Senior Vice President, Contract and Program Services, Pharmacy, Vizient

Our hands-on change management support covering all areas of spend ensures access to inventory, desirable outcomes and differentiated value. Kevin Johns

Supplier Implications

Action Items

Key Takeaways

Leverage all the information and resources available in Pharmacy and Assurance, including Novaplus Enhanced Supply and the Budget Impaction Projections report.

Providers expect suppliers to both ensure product and keep prices stable. It's critical for suppliers to understand and be able to speak to providers' biggest pain points right now.

Vizient is committed to connecting healthcare suppliers, providers and other key stakeholders to increase the reliability, affordability and quality of care.

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Check out important resources on the Assurance webpage and reach out with questions.

Consumer Outreach, Engagement and Education With ShareMD

Jon Barlow, Vice President of Consumer Innovation, Vizient, Raleigh, North Carolina; Adrian Lawrence, Chief Technology Officer, ShareMD, Atlanta, Georgia

This topic highlights a novel approach to provide greater healthcare education across your entire community. Health systems need to be more involved in finding and retaining long-term patients in the marketplace or risk losing them to disruptors and competitors. Jon Barlow

Supplier Implications

Action Items

Key Takeaways

Strengthen patient activation efforts through better identification of consumer care needs and decreasing patient friction.

Suppliers should look for ways to drive more specific procedural volumes to highlight the value and quality of their products.

It's important to understand new market trends that help healthcare consumers navigate their care needs in a different way.

Read Kaufman Hall's State of Consumerism in Healthcare.

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From Strategy to Implementation: Three Case Studies Demonstrating Profitable Growth

Amit Sharma, Senior Principal, Sg2, Chicago, Illinois; Brian Hardy, RPh, Associate Vice President, Pharmacy, Vizient, Irving, Texas; Jay Prystowsky, MD, Principal, Sg2, Chicago, Illinois

Hospital margins are stabilizing in 2023, a positive sign for the industry. But that position is tenuous. When pursuing a cost reduction strategy, leaders should examine and deploy profitable growth strategies to strengthen the position of their organizations. Brian Hardy

Supplier Implications

Action Items

Key Takeaways

It is time to implement a multimodal operation to bill and deliver pharmaceuticals across the ambulatory continuum.

Suppliers should better understand the ambulatory space, as well as the the top-line levers available to health systems as they plan for revenue growth in the next five years.

Not having an outpatient pharmacy presence leads to several drawbacks, including loss of patients and loss of revenue opportunities.

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Enterprisewide Workforce Management: Unlocking Potential with Data-Driven Insights

Will Bowen, CPM, LSSBB, Principal, Labor Cost Consulting, Vizient, Irving, Texas; Keith Gregory, Senior Principal, Indirect Spend Advisory Solutions, Vizient, Irving, Texas; Kerry Poole, RN, BS, MBA, Principal, Indirect Spend Management, Vizient, Irving, Texas; Bruce Leavitt, PharmD, MBA, Senior Executive Director, Pharmacy Consulting, Vizient, Irving, Texas

The challenges are multifaceted. A lot of the changes are happening quickly, and how we react and adjust to the market needs will determine our success. Bruce Leavitt

Provider Implications

Action Items

Key Takeaways

If you're not doing it already, then identify key metrics for your health system or unit and start measuring now.

Healthcare is rapidly changing and providers will need to be nimble to ensure they stay relevant.

Resources for healthcare are becoming more limited and workforce challenges aren't going away.

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Pursuing Margin Sustainability: What It Takes to Drive Transformation

Andrew Mancuso, SVP/GM, Delivery Performance Management, Advisory & Analytics, Vizient, Irving, TX; Ryan Freel, Managing Director, Kaufman Hall

Cutting-edge organizations are taking a step back to evaluate this 'new normal' and are revising how they look at their strategic plan. You can't just tweak your historic plan year to year. That's not going to get you where you need to be. Ryan Freel

Consider this ...

Action Items

Key Takeaways

It's important to have conversations at the system or facility level to begin (or continue) your journey to transformation. Ask the following questions:

Divest from your organization's weaker areas and instead redeploy capital to make your "best in class" areas even better. Focus on the strengths that truly differentiate you from your competitors — and make them even stronger.

Hospitals and health systems are going to continue to face challenges — everything from local to national market disruptions contribute to the complexity of delivering care.

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Action Items

• Providers must focus on short-term growth because that is what's going to enable a focus on longer-term transformative efforts around patient loyalty.

Top Takeaways

• Resources to provide care across the continuum are becoming more restrictive and health systems are struggling financially.
• The demand for nurses, physicians and pharmacists is greater than the admissions rates for those professions.
• The shift to outpatient care will continue to grow alongside a reduction in workforce.
• Regulatory changes are coming, including 340B and the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, among others.
• Reliance on automation and techology is on the rise, requiring more resources and expertise.

Top Takeaways

• Hospitals and health systems are going to continue to face challenges — everything from local to national market disruption contributes to the complexity of delivering care.
• Stabilizing margins requires leadership collaboration.
• Leaders must begin pursuing transformation or must continue to evaluate their roadmap if they are already on the journey to transformation.

Top Takeaways

Not having an outpatient pharmacy presence leads to the following:

• Loss of patients to other systems with established specialty and home infusion pharmacy services.
• Loss of significant revenue opportunities and access to new, limited-distribution drugs.
• Inability to contract with payers as they institute site of care of restrictions, allowing others to capture patients directed away from their system’s hospital outpatient departments.

Top Takeaways

• It's important to understand new market trends that help healthcare consumers navigate their care needs in a different way.
• Vizient and ShareMD have a new approach to consumer acquisition that proactively engages qualified, high-lifetime-value consumers who may not have considered your health system.
• Healthcare stakeholders must identify the intersections of consumer strategy and financial growth that will drive future success for providers.

Action Items

• Internally benchmark and empower team members who do the work every day to identify key metrics.
• Start measuring your performance now and share that up to the C-Suite.

"Internal benchmarking is continuous quality improvement while external benchmarking identifies best practices. The challenge I see currently with external benchmarking is that peer groups are very diverse. I've never been in two hospitals that perfectly aligned with the work that they were executing in their enterprise. So, I see external benchmarking as directional, at best." Bruce Leavitt, Senior Executive Director, Pharmacy Consulting, Vizient

To do so, providers should utilize internal benchmarking and data-driven insights for decision-making. Success will be determined by how providers recognize, adapt and adjust to the ongoing market needs and challenges.

Top Takeaways

• Through the breaking down of silos, Vizient is helping stakeholders in pharmacy and medical supplies to better understand the challenges and opportunities within each.
• Providers should know that they are not alone in the price and supply assurance process — Vizient is here to help ensure access to critical supplies and essential medications.
• Vizient translates scale into realized value that prevents or mitigates the effects of price increases and supports spend visibility across the supply chain.

Action Items: Questions to Ask

• Do your legacy strategic and financial planning processes and capabilities support your necessary transformative decision making? From data, technology and innovation perspectives, where are you investing to enable savings and improve margins?
• How do you and your organization currently approach culture? Do you see it as a nice to have or is it an imperative? What kind of impact does your organization's culture create??

• What are you doing in the short term versus investing in the long term, and how do these plans affect your footprint?
• What initiatives are you (or your team) leading to ascertain or activate on margin improvement targets? What is the timeline for those initiatives and what is the impact to your financial plan?

Action Items

• Payers are implementing restrictions on the site of administration for many specialty infusion and injected biologics. These restrictions require the drug to be administered at a lower cost site of care, such as the home, limiting the number of infusions that are authorized in the hospital outpatient infusion center.
• Payers are also limiting their specialty pharmacy networks and increasing the use of prior authorizations for managing the utilization of high-cost specialty infused medications. Home infusion pharmacies often bill to the medical benefit and can avoid some of these payer imposed restrictions.