One of the largest drivers of unnecessary costs in healthcare is manual labor, which includes managing the thousands of product price changes that occur daily. As healthcare manufacturers and distributors seek to reduce costs and improve efficiencies, they can leverage the new GHX Single Channel 845 solution to automate the process of managing contract price notifications. This solution will enable manufacturers and distributers to get aligned on price, reducing pricing discrepancies to drive significant time and cost savings for both parties.
Traditionally, manufacturers and distributors have had to support multiple file formats to send and receive contract price notifications. Most of these are sent via email and are processed manually, causing pricing updates to be delayed, often by three to six months, and resulting in manual and labor-intensive reconciliation. Distributors must then administer rebates and chargebacks, which in a 2011 HIDA survey cost a combined $12.5 million for 14 distributor respondents.
The GHX Single Channel 845 solution allows manufacturers and distributors to manage price and eligibility updates using their current, preferred notification format. Manufacturers can continue sending price updates in EDI (electronic data interchange) or CSV (comma-separated values) and through the GHX solution, distributors can receive it in their preferred format (i.e., EDI, CSV, etc.). This allows trading partners to automate this complex, shared business process while continuing to use their current workflow.
“There is a tremendous amount of time, resources and cost associated with the identification and correction of price discrepancies among trading partners that are unfortunately very common and inherent in the existing manual processes used to align price data in this industry,”said Carol Stone, VP Corporate Marketing, C.R. Bard, Inc. “Bard sees the development and implementation of the Single Channel 845 as a way to help improve these inefficiencies and help take significant cost out of the industry for all parties.”
“This new solution directly supports our commitment to reducing the cost of doing business in healthcare,”said Derek Smith, chief commercial officer, GHX. “Through automation, Single Channel 845 will improve accuracy and create efficiencies that help drive real cost savings for manufacturers and distributors. Single Channel 845 will help reduce costs for suppliers by reducing price discrepancies, manual processing costs, and labor-intensive reconciliation of discrepancies.”
About GHX
Global Healthcare Exchange, LLC (GHX) is driving costs out of healthcare by transforming the healthcare supply chain. Working with providers and suppliers, GHX is accelerating change by providing a faster, more efficient and collaborative supply chain that will take billions of dollars out of the cost of healthcare. For more information, visit www.ghx.com and The Healthcare Hub.