Premier-Yankee Alliance collaborative Breakthrough savings could top $4M
Yankee Alliance is a member-driven organization of healthcare providers across the country. Founded in 1983, the Yankee Alliance family of companies provides a wide range of services designed to enhance members' financial, operational, and clinical effectiveness. Group purchasing activities provide members significant cost savings opportunities. Transformation learning initiatives offer members the benefit of best-practice applications and knowledge transfer initiatives generated through a collaborative process Yankee Alliance has developed and nurtured over the last 25 years. Yankee Alliance specializes in improving our members' bottom lines through reducing costs, improving quality, and streamlining operations. Our group purchasing program combines the Yankee Alliance portfolio with those negotiated by the Premier alliance, our national group purchasing organization.
Situation:
The Yankee Alliance was offered an opportunity to participate in Premier’s Collaborative Breakthrough Series (BTS) which uses the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s model for improvement; participants commit to collaborate with peers from other healthcare organizations to accelerate supply chain improvements and implement changes that will significantly improve operations and potentially eliminate millions of dollars of unnecessary supply-related expenses.
Solution:
Ten Yankee Alliance members opted to participate. Objectives included identifying quality and cost improvement opportunities for select cardiovascular-related procedures, developing strategies to positively engage cardiologists, developing tools to monitor performance, and identifying opportunities for regional purchasing contracts. Premier consultants used Premier tools such as CardiacFocus™ and ClinicalAdvisor™ to analyze the participant-provided data using regional benchmarks, down to the cardiologist performance level.
Result:
- Collectively, participants experienced nearly $3 million in savings, and that may surpass $4 million as new contracts are negotiated.
- Participants initiated a CRM group buy, receiving more competitive pricing.
- Cost savings were obtained through contract renegotiations as well as changing physician practices to use products that cost less when appropriate.
"It cost us less than $20,000 and we’re estimating that we will save
around $120,000 this year. We’re an extremely small cardiovascular lab so that’s
really significant. We thought we had great pricing but learned that our pricing
was actually far off the benchmark pricing for our size hospital."
Edward Aiello
Director of Materials Management St. Joseph Hospitalr