Sometimes a client wants to see what you can do with one project before jumping in with both feet.
Such was the case with a Southeastern health system with 10 hospitals and almost 200 doctors’ offices and outpatient clinics.
Cardinal Health committed to save one of the system’s larger hospitals $1 million during the first year managing its pharmacy. After exceeding that goal, Cardinal Health began supporting additional facilities. System leadership noticed that managed facilities performed better and decided to leverage the pharmacy to achieve its strategic goals.
Today the health system relies on a three-pronged strategy for all its pharmacies: cost savings, system standardization and revenue growth.
Here are three questions to ask about how such an approach could work for your facility:
Q: How can a pharmacy deliver cost savings to hospitals?
To measure progress, one must start with baseline assessment of performances. For this system, Cardinal Health conducted evaluations to measure pharmacy performance against benchmarks and industry standards to identify opportunities and challenges.
Next, using a clinical consulting approach, the pharmacy collaborates with stakeholders to guide therapies for patients, providing them the safest, most effective drugs at the best cost.
Keeping the baseline assessment top of mind, an annual performance assessment is conducted for continuous improvement, identifying new and potential challenges, while resetting year-over-year savings goals.
Q: How does systems standardization improve quality and accountability?
When hospitals of different sizes use different processes and metrics to measure results, it’s hard to understand the full scope of success. Standardization ensures that all hospitals use the same procedures to make and measure improvements. The process includes operationalizing assessments, drug purchase processes, buyer training, formularies and policies.
Given that inpatient drug spend is approximately 58% of this system’s drug spend, standardization is vital to improve efficiency. This proved true after all 10 of the hospitals implemented these changes and recognized $800,000 in savings in a single year.
Q: How can a health system increase revenue?
Health systems can drive additional volume and revenue in outpatient settings like infusion centers. Some systems hesitate to do so, because rejected or denied regimen orders can be difficult to manage, complicated and time-consuming. However, Cardinal HealthTM AtrixTM Ally can prevent this from occurring and increase remittance team efficiencies.
AtrixTM Ally identifies patient advocacy opportunities to help patients with the cost of care. With this approach, hospitals can reduce bad debt and enhance the patient experience. For example, one health system saved $1.1 million in a single year, including $264,000 in denial avoidance and $836,000 in advocacy.
To learn more about how your health system can unlock the benefits of growth through pharmacy support and resources, read the full article here.
Mike Brown is the Vice President of Managed Services for Cardinal Health