Supply Chain

The hospital supply chain is a complex process of selection, procurement, and distribution of products and services, including physician preference and clinically sensitive items, commodities, pharmaceuticals, and purchased/support services. It typically represents 30 percent to 40 percent of an organization’s total operating expense. The spend is significant, and so are opportunities for improvement.

BRG‘s supply chain experts are dedicated to helping providers identify and reduce supply, drug, and service expenses and improve operational performance. Our consultants identify areas to enhance and implement new standardized processes, key vendor relationships, group purchasing and distributor arrangements, and technologies to optimize savings, improve product availability, reduce product waste, and reduce variation. We deploy proven methods that incorporate standardization/utilization, clinical alignment, benchmarking, value analysis, and operational improvement to deliver, on average, a reduction of 4 percent to 8 percent in total supply and service expenses, translating into operational efficiencies and millions of dollars in savings.

Our supply chain team is composed of seasoned professionals with decades of healthcare operations experience, including with clinical supplies, group purchasing organizations (GPOs), procurement operations, warehouse/distribution, value analysis processes, pharmacy, purchased/support services, and information technology experience. We pair subject-matter expertise with robust benchmarking and analytical tools to support data-driven decision-making and sustain the improvements.

BRG has collaborated with a wide range of providers, from community hospitals to large systems and academic medical centers, on both enterprise-wide and focused engagements to:

• Identify opportunities to redesign and standardize supply chain processes
• Identify and implement centralized supply chain processes across the enterprise
• Evaluate and optimize the performance of group purchasing and distribution services
• Work with clinical and operational staff to reduce overall variation of product and service expenses based on patient cost, quality, and outcomes
• Optimize vendor contracts and aggregate purchasing arrangements to achieve the best price on local or group purchasing agreements
• Reduce the cost of purchased/support services through system standardization, vendor contract improvements, regional/national best practices, and utilization reduction
• Maximize pharmacy impact by 340B optimization, evaluating vendor and payer contracts, revenue enhancement, and drug formulary optimization
• Improve internal data standardization and centralization and establish operational improvement metrics to help monitor and sustain performance