News
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Henry Bostic
Premier Inc.
704.733.5695
Premier to unveil next generation of Spend Advisor at AHRMM conference in San Diego August 12-15
Alliance’s groundbreaking spend analytics tools now more powerful;
three years of user experience guides upgraded functionality, usability
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (August 7, 2007) – The Premier alliance will debut next-generation enhancements to its widely adopted SpendAdvisor spend analytics tool at the Association for Healthcare Resource and Materials Management (AHRMM) conference in San Diego August 12-15.
The improvements will give SpendAdvisor powerful new functionality to support Premier members' business needs better while also improving usability and navigation. More than 50 IDNs are on-board and successfully using the tool to drive millions of dollars in savings.
“We are leveraging more than three years of experience and proven results from our members as to how to best derive savings from advanced spend analytics,” said Premier Group Vice President Marla Weigert. “We have listened to our members who are successfully using SpendAdvisor and integrated their experiences and insights to make SpendAdvisor even more valuable to their organizations and business processes.
“Momentum is building for a tool that is being broadly used by an increasingly diverse range of organizations,” Weigert continued. “Usage is accelerating, and we expect SpendAdvisor to grow quickly over the next year. It already covers more than $4.4 billion in supply spend, one of the largest databases in healthcare.
“We see SpendAdvisor as essential to our alliance’s success,” said Weigert. “It is synchronized with Premier’s contract launches, leading-edge catalog, electronic price activation, and robust data infrastructure. Premier is committed to continued investment in technology to maximize contract savings and achieve aligned objectives of our alliance.”
Mississippi Baptist Health System in Jackson, Miss., doubled supply chain savings in the 2006 fiscal year to more than $10 million using SpendAdvisor. Alamance Regional Medical Center in Burlington, N.C. already has realized its $1 million annual supply chain savings goal this year after using SpendAdvisor only six months.
Wendell Osborne, Supply Chain Director at Alamance Regional, says “SpendAdvisor is a great product. It has saved me a ton of time. You can tell a lot of time and effort was spent in design – how it works. Once I got all my data loaded, jumped in and started to work with it, it didn’t take long to learn how to use it effectively.
“I can definitely recommend it,” Osborne said, “The best description I can give you is before when someone told me to ‘go west,’ then I’d follow the sun for contract savings. Now I have a GPS system that helps me get there. We did a pretty good job of getting there before, but now it’s a whole lot easier and takes a whole lot less time!”
Premier Vice President of Product Development and Adoption Bill Marquardt said, “The new functionality includes major components of three new dashboards. The new reports and navigation will make it even easier to identify both quick payback savings as well as opportunities to derive sustained value.
“Our members now will be able to view a rollup of supply chain opportunities at the executive level and across customizable facility groups in larger healthcare systems so they can prioritize and set goals that will help guide their organizations toward top quartile supply chain performance.”
The improved reporting functions and better navigation of the robust Web-based spend management decision-support tool were launched July 30. The next two releases in the fall and winter will include an automated tier evaluator, improved benchmark pricing and performance indicators, and a dashboard highlighting how key drivers are impacting supply chain performance.
To accommodate SpendAdvisor’s rapid growth, Premier is enlarging and enhancing its spend data processing infrastructure so that spend data can be processed faster with greater precision and accuracy. These enhancements have the added benefit of getting new users up and running more quickly. In addition, Premier offers extensive training with initial implementation, as well as ongoing support.
About Premier, 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient
Serving 1,700 hospitals and more than 47,000 other healthcare sites, Premier
is the largest healthcare alliance in the United States dedicated to
improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier operates one of the nation's largest healthcare purchasing networks and the most comprehensive repository of hospital clinical and financial information. Premier Insurance Management Services, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary, operates one of the largest policy-holder owned, hospital professional liability risk-retention groups in healthcare.
Headquartered in San Diego, Premier has offices in Charlotte, N.C.,
Philadelphia and Washington. For more information, visit
www.premierinc.com.