GHX Healthcare Customers Surpass $2 Billion in Supply Chain Savings

LOUISVILLE, Colo., May 29, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- GHX, in collaboration with its extensive customer portfolio of healthcare providers and suppliers, crossed the $2 billion mark in documented savings across its North American healthcare supply chain. The company has been tracking savings achieved by GHX trading partners since January 2010 as part of its "5-in-5" strategic goal of cutting $5 billion in healthcare costs over five years.

GHX has the largest footprint in the healthcare supply chain with more than 24,600 acute and non-acute care provider organizations and 10,900 medical-surgical supplier divisions in the U.S., Canada and Europe transacting business through GHX. The GHX Global Network accounts for connectivity to hospitals representing more than 80 percent of licensed beds in the United States alone and to supplier organizations that deliver approximately 85 percent of the medical-surgical products sold in North America. GHX also connects providers and suppliers in nine European countries.

"This is an important milestone for the healthcare industry," said Bruce Johnson, president and CEO of GHX. "Our industry continues to face incredible scrutiny and we need to work together to aggressively cut costs from our healthcare system. GHX is working with members of our GHX Global Network in the U.S. and Canada to provide a catalyst to driving more than $46 billion in electronic dollar volume through the GHX Exchange in 2012. That's an increase of 53 percent over transactions documented just two years ago, at the end of 2009. It's also the reason we are ahead of schedule in eliminating $2 billion in industry supply chain expenses."

GHX recently generated attention from the industry for its entry into the implantable device supply chain market. The GHX solution will capture data from product purchase to product usage at the point of care, creating capture capability while enabling more accurate billing, purchasing and inventory tracking. The implantable devices market is estimated at $40 billion, a segment equal in size to the medical-surgical market in which GHX is well-established as the supply chain technology infrastructure.

"The implantable device market is an area in the healthcare market that has remained largely manual in process, and fraught with significant error and inefficiency," said Johnson. "Healthcare is losing more than $5 billion every year due to the inadequacy of current solutions in the implantable device supply chain. With the upcoming GHX implantable device supply chain solution, we anticipate accelerating the contribution GHX is making to drive cost savings."

As a percentage of revenue, GHX funds double-digit reinvestment in its core products as well as development of new products, like the implantable device supply chain, and other software solutions and services. Over the past six months, the company introduced five new or enhanced products and services to improve the process by which healthcare providers search, source, procure, buy and pay for products.

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