GHX Expands Core Healthcare Supply Chain Exchange Capabilities

LOUISVILLE, Colo., April 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- GHX announced significant enhancements to the company's healthcare supply chain infrastructure, the GHX Exchange, with new capabilities that will be introduced throughout the year. The GHX Exchange is the company's infrastructure supporting $46 billion of medical-surgical spending in North America and provides the foundation for additional GHX supply chain services, such as data management solutions, tools that enhance price validation and visibility, online requisitioning capabilities and other supply management-related functions. New capabilities will support existing applications as well as the recently announced implantable device supply chain solution.

New development for the core architecture of the GHX Exchange will accommodate higher transaction volumes while helping ensure continued fast through-put for electronic business between trading partners. The enhanced GHX Exchange will enable additional redundancy and resiliency for this mission-critical solution that both suppliers and providers require, and depend upon, in today's healthcare environment. Additional development includes enhancements to integration capabilities and the user experience.

"The GHX Exchange currently processes over $46 billion volume in transactions per year and is growing at nearly 20 percent a year on a compounded basis," said Derek Smith, executive vice president, GHX. "Our investment in this vital foundation is providing the platform for our upcoming implantable device solution as well as a host of other opportunities for our customers to get greater visibility into their supply chain."

Members of the GHX Global Network, including over 4,000 hospitals in North America, are transacting business with over 10,000 of the medical-surgical suppliers via the GHX Exchange. The GHX Exchange transaction volumes are expected by GHX to double or even triple in the next few years as members of the GHX Global Network accelerate their use of e-business capabilities, and include more types of document processing such as e-invoices and those supporting the purchase, use and billing of implantable devices.

The new architecture also includes enhancements to the user interface, providing more streamlined functionality and a new look-and-feel across GHX products. Soon, GHX Exchange users subscribing to GHX Procurement solutions will be able to access Procurement Suite via a new interface that allows single sign-on and enables data to flow more seamlessly between products in this suite. The new GHX Exchange architecture will be extended to all solutions, with Procurement Suite the first to be impacted by the enhancements.

The GHX Exchange was first deployed in 2000 and has since established nearly 300,000 unique trading partner relationships. Over the past two years, the Exchange and related services have helped participants in the GHX Global Network to take $1.9 billion out of the cost of healthcare, making significant progress toward the GHX five-year goal of $5 billion in cost reductions.

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