GHX Reveals Roadmap to Stronger Healthcare Community at GHX Healthcare Supply Chain Summit

ORLANDO, Fla., May 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Grappling with economic uncertainty, financial and regulatory pressures and impending reform, the healthcare industry is on the cusp of major changes, said Bruce Johnson, president and CEO of GHX, during the opening session of the 2012 GHX Healthcare Supply Chain Summit. More than 800 healthcare leaders from hospitals, manufacturers, GPOs and distributors gathered this week in Orlando for the annual Summit event.

Johnson challenged the healthcare industry with his prescription for the health of healthcare: increased trust and collaboration between trading partners; adoption of new technology solutions to automate areas of profound inefficiency; and tenacity to implement transformational business processes.

According to industry research, trust between providers and suppliers continues to erode, said Johnson. But the opportunity to work together to create a sustainable healthcare system is tremendous. "We need to get to a place where information is moving throughout the entire system creating visibility so we can build a much more efficient supply chain. This 360-degree supply cloud of the future will actually allow us to tie into patient registries, recall logs and electronic health records."

"Ultimately, it always comes back to putting a working supply chain model in place that truly supports the patients that we are serving. Our mission is to deliver solutions that enable better patient care in order to deliver billions in savings for this community by maximizing automation, efficiency and accuracy of business processes," continued Johnson. "We have long-standing inefficiencies in healthcare – we need leaders who have the tenacity and perseverance to overcome these inefficiencies."

Derek Smith, executive vice president of marketing and product management, announced a series of new products including enhancements to the company's product backbone, the GHX Exchange. "We're continuing to invest, and build both strength and capacity around our backbone so that it scales with the demands of your business," Smith told the attendees. "In fact, we're forecasting that our volume is going to double, if not triple."

Smith talked about a variety of new products announced for the Summit included a new eInvoicing solution and a provider analytics and reporting solution called Provider Intelligence, as well as enhancements to the company's Registration Center and Procurement solutions. Chief among the technology announcements was additional information about the new GHX Implantable Device Supply Chain.

"At GHX, one of our key goals is to make these extremely complex processes – many of which take place today through systems that don't connect to each other and departments inside a single organization that aren't yet working together – and make them simple," said Smith. "The way I think about this, is that everything we've done historically to help you better manage spend in med-surg now translates to a new opportunity to help you reduce costs in implantables."

According to Martin Payne, vice president, device and implant segment, the culprit in the management of implantable devices is a process that is complex and manual. The process is often run independently from the hospital and the manufacturer, each managing implantable devices separate from the other. "So it's more complex, its manual, and they aren't working together to solve the problem," Payne said.

"To tackle the problem, what we have to get to is a platform that allows you to collaborate in a way that's frictionless. It requires one integration point where you're talking the same language in terms of data and can automate the process and adopt the solution in rapid fashion while still using your own systems to automate individual work flows. It's the connectivity piece that GHX creates that really brings the benefit to the industry," said Payne.

The GHX Healthcare Supply Chain Summit is the only forum in healthcare today that brings together participants from across the entire healthcare supply chain to address these and other important issues within a collaborative environment. Healthcare providers, manufacturers, distributors and group purchasing organizations convene to learn from one another, challenge each other and formulate new solutions to problems facing the industry. For information about the Summit including video clips, Twitter feeds, and more, go to www.ghx.com/supplychainsummit.

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