Healthcare Procurement Efficiency Transformation: A Time Savings Success Story

There are numerous time-intensive aspects of healthcare procurement: supplier relationship management, order guide management and administrative management. Direct Supply® DSSI™  reduces these time-intensive aspects for healthcare providers, driving efficiency, increasing visibility and driving cost savings.

The Problem: Manual Procurement Processes 

The healthcare procurement process is complex, with numerous moving parts. Let’s use a 135 location Senior Care organization as an example. The organization started using the best-in-class DSSI platform as their ordering system, bringing all their purchases across their 135 locations together in one place. At this point, the internal procurement team was still responsible for all order guide management and platform administration tasks. Even with the platform driving significant efficiencies in these processes, the team was still spending 24 hours a month on basic order guide management tasks and 11 hours a month on platform and user management tasks – that is almost one full week a month on back of house processes! To make matters worse, the team was struggling to manage the almost 1,900 discontinued products across their order guides at any given point in time. 

The Approach: Streamlining Back of House Procurement Operations with Direct Supply DSSI

It’s clear that the issue outlined above was common among healthcare organizations. Direct Supply DSSI is designed to solve challenges such as this one, and focuses on easing the burdens around back of house procurement processes in a number of ways. 

1. A Dedicated Direct Supply DSSI Help Desk

Direct Supply DSSI has a built-in Help Desk designed to take the manual work of the hands of our customers, so they can focus their valuable time directly supporting residents and patients or working on strategic initiatives for their organization. Instead of manually handling all user management or facility management tasks, customers submit a ticket to their Help Desk support at Direct Supply DSSI and they handle it → it really is that easy!

2. Proactive Discontinued Product Management

The healthcare supply chain is volatile, and changes to product availability happen constantly. The DSSI platform has tools in place to avoid disruptions to ordering due to discontinued products for facility level purchasers, however those discontinued products still need to be managed at an order guide level. With the Direct Supply DSSI solution, the DSSI team proactively identifies discontinued products on customer order guides and finds suitable substitutions based on contracts, rebates, pricing and quality.

3. Next Level Order Guide Management

Order guide management is a manual process, and conducting effective category optimizations can take weeks or months to complete. Direct Supply DSSI was designed to drive efficiencies for healthcare organizations in this process. The DSSI team actively monitors customer order guides and makes changes based on product availability and numerous other factors to ensure they are always up-to-date. 

The Result: Significant Time Savings for Healthcare Procurement Professionals

The significance of how Direct Supply DSSI saves time for healthcare procurement teams is obvious. Organizations that leverage the expertise and technology of Direct Supply DSSI spend 75% less time on basic order guide management and almost 20% less time on administrative procurement tasks such as user and facility management. For healthcare procurement teams that have limited members (spoiler: that is most procurement teams!), the time saved on these tasks is game changing. Direct Supply DSSI allows healthcare procurement professionals to focus on providing value-adding service to their organization and the residents and patients they serve rather than back of house procurement processes.

Interested in learning more? Read our blog “4 Strategies to Enhance your Healthcare Procurement Process“.