We Did It! We Surpassed $5 Billion in Healthcare Savings

Bruce Johnson

Four and a half years ago when we set the ambitious goal to take $5 billion in cost out of healthcare in five years, we knew it wasn’t a given. A lot of work had to be done and we knew we couldn’t successfully accomplish this strategic goal without the GHX Global Network of supplier and provider customers. Well yesterday we did it! Our GHX "5 in 5" ticker that tracks our progress against the goal crossed beyond $5 billion. This milestone was achieved more than four months ahead of schedule. For GHX, this accomplishment demonstrates the power of an industry working together through a single technology partner to make a measurable difference in the cost of healthcare.

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GHX has long been an advocate for supply chain collaboration and visibility among healthcare trading partners to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and help free-up time, money and resources to provide more focus on patient care. Five billion dollars of eliminated cost from healthcare is a significant opportunity to focus those resources on quality patient care - exactly where the focus should be.

These savings came from increased automation, efficiencies, and visibility in both the med-surg and implantable devices supply chains. We know there is still a significant amount of opportunity and work to be done. This $5 billion is the tip of the ice berg and GHX will continue to provide solutions to drive automation, efficiency, accuracy and visibility in business processes for even more savings

Our GHX Global Network of more than 18,000 acute and non-acute care provider organizations and 10,000 medical-surgical supplier division customers are utilizing supply chain technology to drive savings and eliminated costs from healthcare. We know that by helping drive greater accuracy into more automated supply chain processes, GHX and its customers are leading the charge in transforming the healthcare industry by reducing costs and helping providers deliver cost-effective, high-quality patient care.

What this $5 billion is really demonstrates is that the industry can significantly increase savings by conducting as much business as possible electronically with trading partners and sending more of their procure-to-pay transactions, including purchase orders (PO), PO acknowledgements, advance ship notices, invoices, catalog price updates, etc. through EDI (electronic data interchange).

Those who are maximizing automation and management of non-labor spend, including implantable devices, and are making improvements in areas such as contract price alignment, AP automation, and data standardization and synchronization are achieving the greatest results.

We at GHX couldn’t be more proud to know that by working with our incredible customers in the U.S., Canada and Europe, we are all are helping to solve the cost quality equation at the center of healthcare. Congratulations to us all.