Healthcare Supply Chain Consumables and Supplies

Healthcare supply chain overspends an estimated $20 billion annually on medical-surgical supplies and implants across thousands of categories. Overspending results from a combination of factors—including weak competitive pricing, cursory product knowledge, lack of product standardization, and overutilization of products. Supply chain leaders need a trusted partner to support the med-surg decision-making process.

Supply chain leaders, suspect there’s room to improve, but may not have the tools to perform an effective analysis. ECRI’s Supply Guide advisory service empowers decision makers with actionable intelligence to drive real savings. As a trusted voice in healthcare technologies, ECRI leverages research and testing expertise to provide knowledge and assurance needed to make informed, unbiased purchasing decisions.

ECRI really opened my eyes. We’ve renegotiated over 20 contracts for better pricing since we implemented ECRI.

Medical supply price benchmarking

Understanding local market dynamics is essential to improving price negotiations. One of the easiest ways to impact the bottom line is to benchmark prices on medical-surgical supplies against market metrics.

ECRI’s robust price database gives members valuable insight about supply spend by comparing five selectable market price points against what peers actually paid on more than 2 million unique surgical supplies and implants.

The database interface makes it fast and easy to view savings opportunities by facility, department, supplier, category, and item or SKU. The exhaustive benchmark database produces insightful market pricing metrics nationally, by region, by spend range, by bed size, and more. ECRI puts the assurance of unbiased data at leaders’ fingertips to improve price negotiations and deliver savings.

Typically, members identify opportunities in the range of 15% on their overall spend.

Standardization and utilization analytics

As healthcare organizations work to adopt new practices that shift focus from pricing to sustainable savings, many encounter a common hurdle: inability to compare products and usage in an objective manner.

The Functional Equivalents module eliminates guesswork and personal bias as purchasers identify functional equivalents or alternative products. Decision makers can compare by item or category using selected key performance indicators (KPIs). Purchasing and clinical teams gain the assurance needed to make the best decision on cost-effective patient care when consolidating vendors, standardizing products, or finding alternatives due to FDA or product recalls.

The Utilization Analytics module is another important consideration as leaders continue to review practices to drive sustainable savings. Often, utilization comparisons are made internally within the healthcare system without visibility into true, unbiased, peer-to-peer external benchmarks.

Technology testing and evaluations

When leaders need to make a purchase or standardization decision, but lack in-depth product knowledge, ECRI experts can provide independent, unbiased product ratings and medical device technology evaluations on a per-request basis. ECRI tests, evaluates, and compares technologies in our onsite medical device laboratory or at the decision maker’s location. Our uncompromising rigor gives purchasers the assurance needed to make informed and unbiased purchase decisions. Learn more about our Evaluation and Comparison solution.

Unsurpassed personal service

Becoming an ECRI member means that healthcare supply chain decision makers no longer have to “go it alone.” ECRI will provide tailored, personalized, expert guidance and real data to assist our members and help them save money. ECRI will use member’s own data to produce spend, standardization, and utilization analytics to identify potential savings. ECRI experts are with our members at every step of the journey to achieve savings. Members can request on-demand reports to support specific purchasing initiatives.

Interested in learning more?

Setup a consultation with an ECRI expert to learn more about how we can support your med-surg decision-making process.