Identifying potential savings for physician preference items
As COVID-19 prompted hospitals across the country to suspend routine care and postpone elective surgeries, leaders at RUSH examined how they could reduce costs.
Luis Forero, director of strategic sourcing and procurement at RUSH University Medical Center, looked to Vizient analytics in his request to reduce the hospital’s shoulder replacement spend and found a unique source of savings, physician preference items, or PPI, used when performing shoulder replacement surgeries.
After seeing the data, Forero knew RUSH’s procedural costs were high and that the opportunity was too big to ignore.
First, RUSH’s operational excellence committee or executive supply chain council needed to agree with his findings. Before this step, Forero spoke with the charge nurse on the orthopedic surgery floor to validate that his findings matched her experienced on a daily basis with shoulder replacement surgeries.
With buy-in from the top and validation from those on the surgical floor, Forero was to establish a clinical partnership with the physicians by approaching RUSH’s chief of orthopedic surgery and top three orthopedic surgeons.
Forero presented his data, highlighting the wide variation in procedural costs.
21%
Reduction in RUSH's shoulder replacement spend in less than one year using the following Vizient tools to reduce shoulder replacement spend:
- Procedural Analytics provides internal cost, utilization and clinical data
- Savings Actualyzer provides external market data and peer benchmarks
- Advisory Solutions uses the external and internal data to construct an objective, data-driven strategy to reduce costs and improve clinical outcomes
- aptitude platform runs the RFP process, performs proposal analytics, and provides prenegotiated terms and conditions
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