Sometimes overlooked, a health system’s service spend is often equal to their product supply chain expense, maybe even larger. Spend for purchased services resides in a number of areas including facility support services, contracted clinical services, information technology and telecommunications, financial services, ancillary support services, insurance services, and human resource support services. The decentralization of the service expense management organizationally, coupled with limited benchmark information, and relevant national contracts has historically made it challenging to manage these expenses. 

In response to these challenges, CHC Supply Trust has collaborated with Valify, a technology solutions provider, to provide our members with a comprehensive, yet centralized view of their total services’ expense. In addition to categorizing all of the expenses based on the respective functional areas, it also provides benchmarks specific to each specific contract category and an apples-to-apples comparison regardless of the size of the health system.

Currently, 61 CHC Supply Trust members have implemented the Valify application with more being set up each month. One of the early adopters, Hunt Regional Medical Center in Greenville, Texas, has recognized the value of the application in numerous ways. “The Valify platform has been a ‘gigantic spotlight’ on our service contracts and brings a lot of transparency,” said Billy Robinson, Director of Supply Chain Services, Hunt Regional Medical Center. “The visibility to the data has facilitated more productive discussions with both internal staff and physicians to identify potential improvements as well as externally with vendor negotiations. The technology platform is not a quick fix, but it provides our own health system’s data coupled with national industry information to create a baseline of information to support a collaborative approach to improvements.” 

CHC Supply Trust collaborates with members to consider volume aggregation of their service spend to achieve additional cost savings and enhance their contract protections.  As part of these efforts, CHC Supply Trust encourages members to participate in HealthTrust’s Aggregated Sourcing Events (ASE) (see schedule below).