Salem Health Attributes 25% Savings to Insights from Premier Analytics

As a LEAN hospital looking to reduce waste, Salem Health (Salem, OR) needed to find a solution that could replace its existing contract management system and provide better visibility of its contracts. The health system wanted a tool that could decrease the time spent creating reports in Excel, allow for customization of report fields, and provide rebate and RFP management – all within one application.

Salem Health’s supply chain team decided that the features of Premier’s Sourcing and Contract Management (SCM) tool could easily provide the insights they were looking for. Although some within the organization expressed concern about moving over 2,000 service and supply contracts into a new system would be daunting, Premier® helped coordinate the process of moving the data from Salem Health’s existing system and aided in documentation, saving the team valuable time. Premier’s implementation team helped save Salem Health more than 80 hours of work by translating data from their legacy system to SCM’s format while creating and populating user defined fields for reports.

With onsite training and support from Premier, Salem Health’s supply chain team learned how they could tailor SCM to meet their needs. Their old contract management system required a service ticket to request any new dashboard views. Now, with SCM, Salem Health is able to customize reports and select the fields they want to display, helping to create efficiencies for staff.

Salem Health’s supply chain team also benefited from faster cost analysis on contract price activations. Rather than spending hours in Excel, the team now receives a notification when a new price activation is available. They are then able to produce a report to quickly analyze the financial impact of the new price.

As an ancillary benefit, the supply chain team has been able to identify where their item master did not match their pricing on Premier or local agreements. This data has allowed the team to see which products require price validation so that it could be corrected across all systems.

“Compared to our previous tool, the user interface of SCM has been so much easier to use. Now we can create reports and dashboard views specific to our needs without having to wait for others to create the dashboard for us. SCM has been a timesaver for us.”

– Brooks Kary

Supply Chain Strategy and Contracts Manager, Salem Health

Salem Health plans to implement SCM’s dashboard features in FY19 which should allow the team to gain service line insights to quickly see where department utilization on PPI products are tracking.