Exchange for Hospital Sourcing

Hospitals working with INHX lower their headaches and trim wasteful activities to reduce the total cost to serve as a customer; in turn rationalising overall healthcare costs. Supply chain constitutes a significant portion of your costs - as high as 60% of hospital expenses; amongst the top 2 expenses alongside manpower. Significant business efficiencies accrue when trading parties linkup, interface and transact on 'one' online exchange. It substantially reduces cycle times and related overheads/errors. Moreover, non-core areas that otherwise are compromised are upgraded to robust processes with adequate checks and balances. INHX specializes to make this hassle-free for trade partners; and lets them focus on core business of patient care.

Common master, besides tedious maintenance of up-to-date product data pool, also enables users to know their options in an ever-growing vast portfolio of products - find easily and discover more. Also, hospital users connect directly and interact frequently with suppliers (portfolio managers and product champions) and distributors through convenient 24/7 digitized interfaces. Exchange delivers automation and integration at no direct cost as it offers high contract assurance with no exceptions. Simple enabling features; like cascading bar-code scanning of items and documents; saves lots of time and prevent errors too. Benefits extend into exploiting the networks on the exchange for a variety of collective leverages.

Maintaining current and correct master data with secure database management for transactional records is as critical to operational efficiency as business automation. Master data of products, suppliers, locations and profiling of patients consume a significant proportion of administrative effort. Moreover these are a big cause of errors, delays and inefficiencies. In today's dynamic healthcare environment with ongoing transitions and rapid new introductions, master maintenance has become even more complex. A common platform enables this through a collaborative process and provides accurate up-to-date records. All parties interfaced on the healthcare exchange work to ensure real-time updates, hence spreading the maintenance efforts and ensuring data hygiene. Standard record keeping aids effective transitions and provides easily retrievable records.

Product data pools, besides reducing administration efforts and errors, create live visibility of available options and makes it easier to find and discover products. Changes and additions to the item masters are updated in a common data pool for everyone to use the latest version. Digital data sync cuts down expensive man-hours spent to update item masters and duplicate products information collated through manual coordination and data entry. Scope of the common master initiative is extended from product data pool to:

• Universal catalogue to know your options.
• Easy in-context messaging to the portfolio managers and product champions.
• Universal coding and classification.
• Portfolio management with preference organizer and sorter.
• Integrate AIDC (automatic information and data capture) capabilities to scan almost anything anywhere for error-free-efficiencies.

Smart exchange-wide checks lock the item code to standardize coding across items, entities, locations, documents and more. The exchange facilitates to transcend-item-scan at every point of receipt and issue to ensure accuracy and control. This also extends to transcend-document-scan by reproducing document serial controls as bar-codes; hence reducing processing time and errors.

Gain higher producitivity in hospital sourcing as you get the suppliers/distributors aligned with secure and encrypted 121 contracts. INHX enables you to upgrade from disjointed ERPs to one online exchange. Currently lots of time is consumed in manual checks and manual interfaces with inefficient supply chain processes and uncontrollable external ecosystem inefficiencies. EDX (electronic-data-exchange) between providers, suppliers and distributors is essential to reduce administrative overheads. The integrated supply chain automation cloud simplifies the otherwise tedious and time-consuming tasks through workflow automation (standardisation) and integration (alignment) with robust business processes, digital authorizations and more. Proactive validations control exceptions.

Significant money and resources are spent on manual, inefficient trade and supply chain processes. Understandably it is an administrative nightmare to manage orders with multiple trading parties through faxes, paperwork and phone calls. Therefore, e-commerce is the only sustainable solution to manage this complexity. INHX handles transactions from inception to the finish line; from order to fulfilment tracking to acknowledgement to bills processing. Moreover, this reduces errors and latency associated with manual interfaces. Electronic Data Exchange (EDX) replaces loads of paperwork, phone calls, faxes, emails and posts. Saves time, reduces errors, ensures completeness and avoids reconciliation.

With INHX hospitals, reduce complexity and reduce cycle times in their procure-to-pay processes and related interfaces. EDX significantly reduces costs associated with processing orders. Online exchange also allows you to view electronic invoices in real-time, helping you to resolve exceptions more effectively. Electronic order processing not only ensures contract pricing accuracy but also allows many user friendly tools to improve supply chain and aid exchange of value between providers and suppliers.

What worth is a lot of disparate data that is not analyzed to produce actionable information? Shared investments in data analytics tools as plug-ins to the information technology resources empower every provider to monitor and best address the key performance requirements. Additionally, since this is all hosted on a central backend platform, operational benchmarking results and network trends are accurately generated for consenting members. Tools that provide accurate reporting results lead to the best decisions. More than simply saving money the following help to highlight opportunities and areas in question:

• Decision Dashboards
• Business Intelligence Tools
• Performance Trending Tools
• Alert Systems

Analytics open pathways for realistic opportunities for contract savings, product standardization, revenue growth, improved cash flows, reporting outcome variability and enhanced productivity.

Working with INHX enables hospitals to reduce hassles, errors and headaches as they improve controls, efficiency and productivity. They get recurring savings that reflect in a better bottom line. Some more direct and indirect benefits are:

• Staff productivity enables more work with less headcounts. Aim for over 60% reduction in procurement processing time.
• Reduce cycle times and eliminate duplication.
• Digitized capture saves time and prevents errors.
• Advance focus on patient care - as you reduce operational administration and hassles.
• Higher alignment with vendors strengthens relationships and makes it a partnership approach to serve the patients better.
• Better decisions faster: Advanced capture of spends information available on live dashboards.
• Enhanced operational performance with process standardization and workflow automation.
• Better understanding of available options with the information on common master.
• Work closely with suppliers and distributors to reduce turnaround time for better patient care.
• Get original quality product and combat counterfeiting.
• Compliance with UDI (unique device identitification) guidelines.

Since INHX business model is based on pay-for-use arrangements, the arbitrage on trade throughput on the exchange is charged on a supplier-only-pays model. Very much like the caller-only-pays model of telecom - where incoming calls are free for the receiving party. Therefore, hospitals and distributors get to use the exchange for free on that account. Likewise the common master is nominally charged to the suppliers only - no charge to hospitals and distributors for the use of information and other related tools. Minimal costs that potentially accrue for hospitals and distributors may be related to implementation and ongoing user support or some costs for customized development or integration requirements. Moreover being a cloud platform, there are no specific hardware/software requirements. Also, it is future-proof and hassle-free in terms of upgrades and uptime respectively.

Interested to explore upside for your healthcare establishment? Write to us at inhx@inhx.com. Undertake a supply chain assessment to define measurable goals and link it to overall growth strategies for your business.