UHC Integrates Clinical and Supply Spend Data to Identify Savings Opportunities

CHICAGO, July 27, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- UHC today announced a new offering for UHC supply chain participants that links clinical and supply data, thereby identifying potential savings opportunities for supply-intensive medical/surgical service lines and procedures.  The new Base Medicare Severity Diagnosis-Related Group (MS-DRG) Report capability is another significant enhancement of UHC's market-leading spend analytics tool, SpendLINK®.

The new report displays information from the UHC Clinical Data Base/Resource Manager™ and gives users access to both clinical and supply data within the same reporting system. This new enhancement will allow health care executives to pinpoint costs in the continuum of care for each patient, contributing to identification of potential cost savings and more efficient medical supply utilization.

"The ability to link clinical and supply chain data clearly gives UHC members an advantage in performance improvement," said Jake Groenewold, senior vice president, Supply Chain, UHC.  "The new service fosters collaboration between hospitals' clinical and supply chain teams and helps them better understand how to cut costs while maintaining high standards of patient care."

Supply-intensive procedures, such as major joint replacements, can be costly for hospitals that need to purchase and store supplies but may not be doing so as efficiently as possible. A feature of the new report allows users to view an opportunity summary by base MS-DRG code for these supply-intensive procedures.  Further, the tool allows the user to sort by principle procedure code and principal procedure physician.  Users can then drill down to the details of the related spend categories to gain a better understanding of the supply cost component—supply cost, laboratory, pharmacy, blood, etc—and determine whether there are savings opportunities with regard to price or utilization. 

The report can identify when an organization is paying more than the expected cost and has opportunity to lower its spending; it can also identify a negative cost variance, indicating that an organization is performing better than expected.  The report also allows hospitals to identify potentially costly purchasing patterns, such as lack of standardization.

"The response from UHC members has been extremely positive," said Brent Fiedler, director, Supply Chain Data and Informatics.

About UHC

UHC is an alliance of the nation's leading nonprofit academic medical centers, which are focused on delivering world-class patient care. Based in Chicago, Ill, UHC fosters collaboration with and among its 113 academic medical center and 255 affiliated hospital members through its renowned programs and services in the areas of comparative data and analytics, performance improvement, supply chain management, strategic research, and public policy. UHC helps its members achieve excellence in quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness. Formed in 1984, UHC's membership includes more than 90% of the nonprofit academic medical centers in the United States.  For more information, visit uhc.edu.

SOURCE UHC

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