MD Buyline and MediTract Announce Joint Sponsorship of the 2015 Purchased Services Conference in Houston, TX

Posted By:Katie Regan

DALLAS, TX and CHATTANOOGA, TN — MD Buyline and MediTract, the nation’s #1 provider of Supply Chain and Contract Management Lifecycle solutions, announced today its platinum sponsorship of the 2015 Purchased Services Conference. The annual conference takes place Sept. 28-29, 2015 at The Westin Houston, Memorial City, in Houston, Texas. The conference is being hosted by Global Healthcare Professional Network (GHP Network), a dynamic educational organization that provides best practice learning opportunities for senior hospital and healthcare service providers across the globe. Operating for over 40 years, the group organizes approximately 2,000 worldwide conferences each year.

The Current State of Purchased ServicesIn an environment of declining reimbursements and slim-to-negative operating margins, healthcare providers are constantly on the lookout for sources of additional savings and best practices for optimizing their purchased services contracting process. Purchased services, the largest bucket of the typical provider’s nonlabor spend, is a complex, fragmented portfolio of individual services, which often number in the hundreds per facility.

Unlike supplies spend where the unit of measure is well defined in the form of a Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) and can be compared across vendors and facilities for benchmarking purposes, purchased services are considerably more difficult to standardize. Doing so typically requires a comprehensive, data-driven analysis from multiple sources (e.g., contracts, invoices, purchase orders, procurement cards and accounts payable).

Adding to the complexity, some of these services, such as transcription or credit-card processing, may be national in scope, and others, such as ambulance, physician agreements and security, may be regional or local. Moreover, some are highly clinical in nature, such as dialysis or lithotripsy, and others may be nonclinical, such as print management or food service. Finally, some categories have been targeted to help meet the provider’s supplier diversity or community employment mandates.

Managing the typical portfolio of purchased services in its entirety has proved to be a complicated task. Therefore, many providers have chosen to focus on renegotiating a small number of large categories every three to five years while essentially ignoring other categories. However, with the magnitude of savings often available across the rest of the purchased services portfolio (as much as 30 percent in some of the categories) and the substantial movement in market prices over time, a passive approach is no longer sufficient.

The Only Purchased Services ConferenceTargeted at Healthcare ProvidersThis new conference combines the deep purchased services expertise from leading organizations, such as Ochsner Health System, Ardent Health, University of Texas Medical Center, NYU Langone, Dignity Health and CHRISTUS Health.

Speakers from these organizations, as well as contracting and purchased services experts from MediTract and MD Buyline, will be covering a wide range of topics, including:

• Driving accountability and incremental value in purchased service and outsourcing arrangements.

• Mutually beneficial contracting to exceed organizational performance expectations.

• Managing purchased services and affiliated vendor partners in today’s healthcare industry.

• Key strategies for success in value-based contracts.

• The intersection of compliance and purchased services, measuring quality with outsourced vendors.

SVP of Marketing, David Rodriguez of TractManager Holdings, Inc., the parent organization of MD Buyline and MediTract stated:

The complementary nature of MD Buyline and MediTract’s purchasing and contracting expertise will drive efficiencies for healthcare providers outsourcing clinical and nonclinical services. The two companies share a vision with GHP Networks to help educate healthcare providers about the need to evaluate vendor contract performance through termination, renewal or expansion of all purchased services agreements. As more and more healthcare providers are turning to their trusted advisers from MD Buyline and MediTract to help solve the purchased services challenge, we are pleased to be working with GHP to share our unique knowledge, data and best practices with more healthcare providers.

To register and get additional information about the Purchased Services Conference in

Houston, visit www.hospitalpurchasedservices.com.

About MD BuylineHealthcare providers recognize MD Buyline, founded in 1983, as the leading provider of evidence-based information and research. By creating transparency and fostering consultative relationships, MD Buyline has partnered with providers for more than three decades to identify cost-reduction opportunities for purchased services, consumables, capital and IT. Providers rely on MD Buyline’s data and clinical analysts for financial and clinical insight to reach long- and short-term goals.

About MediTractFounded in 2000, MediTract provides expertise, technology and consulting to assist in the management of contracts and other critical business documents in support of healthcare organizations’ compliance programs. More than 1,400 hospitals across the United States trust MediTract, which creates contract management solutions and strategies for clients in services that range from critical access to enterprise healthcare systems and more.

About MediTractMediTract’s team is highly trained in the field of medical contract compliance. MediTract’s healthcare experts hold Certified Healthcare Compliance (CHC) certifications, enabling them to better guide clients to solutions for healthcare compliance. By having these CHC certifications, the company is prepared to help deliver successful contract life cycle management solutions.

For more information visit http://www.meditract.com/resource-center/some-thoughts-on-tone-at-the-top/

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