Data is an invaluable tool in streamlining costs across healthcare organisations, says Mat Oram, CEO and co-founder of AdviseInc
The sudden arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic threw hospitals and health systems into disarray. Struggling to keep up with the overwhelming demand for PPE, ventilators and other vital equipment, procurement teams in the UK tried and failed in many instances to maintain supplies in the face of huge demand and competition.
Fortunately, help was at hand within the shape of AdviseInc, a healthtech company co-founded by Mat Oram and Philip Stoyle, who both had spent decades working in and around the NHS and healthcare, particularly in procurement. They were also experts in the field of data and analytics, so they offered their services to the NHS or National Health Service for free to deal with the situation.
Originally driving procurement transformation, finding alternative suppliers and price benchmarking products, they went on to create StockWatch, an online application and analytics solution to answer important questions around the availability and location of PPE. By removing the reliance on Excel spreadsheets and paper trails, UK hospitals, care homes and healthcare organisations were able to keep an accurate real-time track of supplies.
“Our data feeds Gold Command across multiple regions and our analytics have been used to help organisations running out of stock like gowns, by providing visibility and enabling prompt mutual aid. Without our tool, this would be difficult,” says Mat Oram, AdviseInc’s CEO.
Price benchmarking
With around 220 NHS trusts in the UK, there is no one central procurement and pricing system. Lack of transparency and clarity over pricing has led to wildly varying costs, with unnecessary overspending frequently taking place.
To resolve this dilemma, Mat designed a Price Benchmarking (PB) tool. This online tool takes data from the majority of NHS trusts and hospitals across the UK to provide product price benchmarks, helping healthcare professionals make sense of what they are spending on medical and general supplies.
“We take data from many hospitals across the UK and we compare apples with apples. So, if you bought a clinical product, we could tell you what price everybody else in the NHS paid for that same product. For example, the price of an orthopaedic spinal screw can vary from £160 to almost £600. By simply ordering the lower price screw, the hospital can make substantial savings. Multiply that across the number of products, procedures and hospitals and the system can save over £100 million.”
Mat and his team work with clinical teams across the health service to explain the benefits of, for example, not using ten different screws when one would be more cost effective. This would reduce the nursing training required and would enable the department to run more economically. “Very often clinicians are not aware of the bigger economic picture and we work closely with them where we can to deliver the change,” he says.
When AdviseInc presented PB to the then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, he immediately requested that the Price Benchmarking solution be rolled out across Britain. AdviseInc’s customers now include 90 per cent of NHS trusts in England, all of Wales and Northern Ireland and a growing number in Scotland. Many organisations see returns on investment of more than 100:1, with AdviseInc’s tool saving NHS Wales more than £1 million a year, and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust over £400,000.
Working internationally
The PB tool has been used in Australia, the USA and Europe, helped by the fact that the pandemic has reduced the necessity to travel. “Most clients are happy that we are based in the UK and trusted with hundreds of millions of rows of data. If they have concerns about data leaving their shores, then we use local Cloud Services and the data remains in their country,” he says.
For new clients they can deliver benefit almost immediately. “We start off with a low cost product which is benchmarking and that allows customers to see the value we can deliver,” he says. For hospital groups they start with price harmonisation – for example in Ireland they worked with three organisations that were being charged different prices for the same products. They then move to more advanced Spend Analytics, Catalogue Checking and Category/Contract Management analytics.
“It’s relatively low cost for us to deliver and high value for the client,” he says. “They can see immediately how they can save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds. Procurement for a single hospital is a massive task on its own; the sheer number of items required makes in-depth, product-by-product comparison unfeasible for individual managers and teams without massive resource. Overspends are often unavoidable.”
With its StockWatch and Spend Analytics tools, Mat is confident that AdviseInc can help current situations globally. “We would be able to help with tracking COVID vaccines,” he says. “If local healthcare workers keep track of the vaccine numbers, we would get regional or national visibility that can be scaled up. Then we can attach a barcode scanner so there would be an understanding of where the vaccines have been rolled out and what the numbers are.” He also maintains that the company would be able to deliver this with a low cost model to allow governments to roll out the system.
“We are able to help organisations save money while not compromising on care,” he says. By providing cost effective analysis and solutions, AdviseInc can make budgets stretch further, and make sense of complex disparate data sources.
Contact information:
support@adviseinc.co.uk