Breakthrough Novation Applications Empower Children's Hospital Association Members to Lower Costs, Increase Quality

IRVING, Texas, July 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Novation, a VHA and UHC company, today announced three new web-based applications with breakthrough interactive features that automate key health care supply chain processes and workflows for members of Children's Hospital Association. 

The new and enhanced applications under the Novation Optimize Solutions umbrella – Value Analysis, Item Master and Formulary – are examples of how Novation helps organizations address the most critical challenges brought on by health care reform. The subscription-based applications represent significant advances in helping hospitals in their efforts to drive higher quality patient care and outcomes at lower costs. 

The Children's Hospital Association selected Novation as their exclusive supply cost reduction partner in 2012. The organization represents a large majority of U.S. children's hospitals including independently governed children's hospitals, organizations within academic medical centers and hospital systems.

"The members of Children's Hospital Association, as well as most health care organizations, are actively looking to invest in technology that will help them thrive in the new value and outcomes-based business models driven by health care reform," said Dan Sweeney, Senior Vice President, Information and Data Services, Novation. "Hospital providers today are looking to us to deliver even greater insights and actionable data to help them make the best decisions throughout the entire procurement process. Today's new products reflect our alignment with the needs of hospital supply chain managers and patient care providers no matter where they are in their journey to transform their operations."

Gaining insight into Value Analysis 
One of the most important functions for supply chain managers is analyzing the value of deploying new products into a hospital. Hospital leaders are looking for information that supports both the efficacy and cost of a product so they can base their purchasing decisions on the best value. This is especially important as hospitals today typically look to reduce costs by 20 percent to 30 percent. 

The new Value Analysis application is the first comprehensive automated workflow solution that instantly connects a hospital's supply chain data with Novation's data that includes seven million products and more than 30 million cross reference relationships. This enables participating hospitals to share and gain valuable insights into best practices quicker and more efficiently for products under evaluation. 

With Value Analysis, Novation provides an automated program with comprehensive workflow tools that allows hospitals to evaluate and assess new technologies, evaluate and compare functionality, and connect key stakeholders, so they can work together on initiatives in a guided and streamlined way. The new application significantly reduces processing time by automating the intensive value analysis workflow. It delivers data driven insights based on product spend, contracts and cross referencing to make complete and informative decisions. It also enables hospitals to customize their experience through implementation templates, questionnaires and evaluations.

New Item Master Portal helps hospitals drive greater savings, revenue
Novation significantly enhanced its Item Master application by making it available as a web-based portal. Leveraging Novation's continued investments in its technology platform, Item Master, which refreshes content daily, now processes information on a monthly basis. Overall, the enhanced application dramatically reduces report processing time for key product and supply information to about 20 minutes. The program enables hospitals to cleanse and enrich product information, audit data quality and clarify supply chain performance.

The new Item Master is especially helpful to Children's Hospital and Medical Center in Omaha, Neb. The only full-service pediatric specialty health care center in Nebraska needed a solution to adjust to changes in requirements by insurance payers to adhere to Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System (HCPCS) codes. The time consuming process of ensuring billing codes for certain items were captured correctly was negatively impacting the hospital's revenue cycle. It also turned registered nurses into makeshift medical billing coders.

"My biggest concern was that I'm not a coder, so I was never confident that I was finding and matching the correct codes. My time was simply not being used effectively," said Lori Kirsch, RN, CPN, Value Analysis, Children's Hospital and Medical Center, Nebraska. "Even with resources from the Patient Revenue department helping out, we still weren't finding the majority of codes we were missing."

As part of using the Item Master service, Children's realized more than $500,000 in revenue that could immediately be billed. That was driven by Novation's ability to cleanse and enrich data based on having the industry's largest repository of validated product information, using trusted industry standards such as HCPCS, UNSPSC and GTIN. 

"Previously, we were getting daily communications from the Patient Revenue department saying, 'we need this code, we need that code.' We don't get those anymore. Novation's Item Master allows us to use our time more wisely," said Kirsch.

New Formulary Application Drives consistency and compliance for preferred products
The company also launched a new web-based supply Formulary application that identifies, analyzes and tracks compliance for preferred products, and automatically provides recommendations for savings throughout an entire hospital system.

Developing and tracking a hospital's list of preferred products – or hospital formulary – is a significantly growing area. Health care providers are faced with new reimbursement standards that reward overall care that is both high quality and lower cost. They have asked for a better way to track the compliance of preferred products across the supply chain, which includes cross referencing and identifying opportunities.

The new Formulary product is a web-based application that brings preferred product information together in one place at any point in time and helps hospitals identify, analyze, track and manage spend opportunities. The product identifies formulary opportunities based on validated cross referencing information through Novation recommendations. The comprehensive and easy to use application guides hospital managers through the entire process from establishing products in the formulary, defining cross references, and enabling compliance tracking for the spend and use of both formulary and non-formulary products. 

Members of Children's Hospital Association can see a demo of the new products in the Novation booth (#1215) at the upcoming AHRMM 14 Conference & Exhibition on Aug. 3-6, at the Orlando World Center Marriott, Orlando, Fla. 

A long history of helping hospitals achieve lower costs, increase efficiencies
In addition to a broad range of industry-leading sourcing, contracting and advocacy programs, Novation is a key technology driver for its alliance partners. The organization develops data and analytic tools to help hospitals more effectively manage costs throughout the supply chain, which typically make up the second largest expense after labor costs.

Novation has created a comprehensive suite of price-benchmarking and cost-management analytic applications in the medical, surgical and pharmaceutical areas. Novation's products are driven by the richest, highest-quality data set which includes information from more than 1600 member organizations representing $80 billion in annual spending. 

Similar to other applications developed by Novation, the new products and services are provided to hospital members through its alliance partners under multiple brand names and some are fee-based. The availability of the applications may vary based on alliance partner timing and integration.

About Novation, Winner of the Ethics Inside® Certification
Founded in 1998, Novation is the leading health care supply chain expertise, analytics and contracting company for the more than 100,000 members and affiliates of VHA Inc. and UHC, two national health care alliances, Children's Hospital Association, an alliance of the nation's leading pediatric facilities, and Provista, LLC. Novation provides alliance members with sourcing services, as well as information and data services. Based in Irving, Texas, Novation develops and manages competitive contracts with more than 800 suppliers. VHA, UHC, and Provista members used Novation contracts to purchase approximately $49 billion in 2013. Novation has earned the coveted Ethics Inside® Certification from Ethisphere Institute, a leading international think tank dedicated to the research and promotion of best practices in corporate ethics and compliance. Novation was also named on Ethisphere's World's Most Ethical Companies list, and is the only company in the health care industry to earn both distinctions for three consecutive years. To learn more about Novation, please visit http://www.novationco.com and follow @NovationNews.

SOURCE Novation