GHX Adds Smart Search to Procurement Suite

LOUISVILLE, Colo., June 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Healthcare providers can now manage spend more effectively using Smart Search, the latest enhancement to GHX Procurement Suite. Smart Search delivers a powerful search engine that helps drive on-contract spending by allowing users to quickly find items in their item master and other catalogs, even if they only know a portion of the product name or part number. GHX Procurement Suite is a procurement automation solution that can help reduce a hospital's medical-surgical supply spend by as much as 12 percent by enabling more efficient business processes and on-contract spending.

For hospital staff members, the process of managing purchasing is complex and time consuming. Procurement Suite leverages one of the industry's most accurate content management platforms, contract optimization capabilities, and connectivity to manufacturers and distributors to create process efficiencies and improve contract compliance. Smart Search takes this one step further by making it faster and easier to search for and find items.

For New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), Smart Search has significantly decreased the average time needed to search for and identify products. "We don't have any other tool that allows us to search as quickly and efficiently," said Joe Quinones, senior assistant vice president, Contracting and Supply Chain, HHC. "It really makes it simple for our clinicians and helps the hospital save money by reducing non-file spend."

"What HHC and other hospitals experience is that the same item may have a different part number in a materials management system, on the order sheet and on the actual box, so finding it isn't always easy," said Derek Smith, executive vice president, Marketing and Product Management, GHX. "Clinicians are pressed for time so if they can't quickly find an item in their item master, they might create a special purchase request, which in turn results in off-contract spending. Smart Search offers the first 'Google-like' search experience for clinicians and hospital supply chain professionals, simplifying the search process to help reduce and control maverick spending. Buyers enter part or all of any item number and quickly find what they're looking for, which means it's more likely they'll get the right product at the right contracted price."

Smart Search quickly searches multiple part number and item description fields, and also across multiple catalogs—item master, contracts and GHX AllSource® Prime—based on a hospital's preferred order. Customers simply type in what they know about a product, and the engine presents results weighted by search strength. The speed and ease of searching help hospitals maximize on-file spend and drive cost savings. For a hospital's clinical team members, this means more time available to be at a patient's bedside, which many provider organizations associate with improved patient safety and quality of care.

GHX Procurement Suite with Smart Search is now available.

About GHX

Global Healthcare Exchange, LLC (GHX), a healthcare technology and services company, helps reduce the cost of doing business in healthcare by enabling better supply chain management. GHX makes it easier for hospitals, other healthcare providers and the suppliers that do business with them to drive cost and inefficiency out of their processes. Working with GHX, the healthcare organizations that make up the GHX Global Network are on track to save $5 billion by 2014—savings that can be invested in such things as hiring more nurses, providing care to uninsured children or developing new medical products. GHX is owned by organizations on both the buy and sell side of the healthcare supply chain, including some of the largest companies in the world. Find GHX on the Web, on Twitter @GHX_LLC and on Facebook @GHX.

SOURCE GHX