CFO Series Part 3: Role of CFO in Supply Chain Tech Consolidation

A health system’s supply chain is critical to its overall success. By making sure healthcare providers have access to safe, high-quality and cost-effective products and technologies for patient care, the supply chain has a significant impact on both the clinical and financial success of the organization. In many health systems, the supply chain team sits within the Finance department and reports to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Therefore, the CFO has significant influence on nearly every aspect of the supply chain team, including budgets, staffing, resources, technologies and more.

Successful health system CFOs recognize that digital transformation in the supply chain is one of the greatest opportunities to impact the fiscal performance of a health system. These CFOs want supply chain technologies and solutions that provide short-term return on investment while equipping the supply chain for flexible growth, improved connectivity and greater visibility into suppliers – providing ongoing value.

Pressure to do More with Less

In many health systems there is increasing pressure to consolidate supply chain solutions, technologies and operations to reduce costs. However, consolidation is fraught with risk, particularly as supply chain teams are often already severely under-resourced.

Some CFOs require supply chain teams to standardize by working with a single group purchasing organization (GPO) or selecting solutions from only one vendor. However, it’s rare that one GPO or vendor meets all of a supply chain team’s needs. Working with a single solution disregards the nuance of specialization needed for a particular health system’s clinical supply chain to be successful. Additionally, it limits the team’s ability to effectively assess best-of-breed products and does not provide the team with access to the competitive insights they need to drive the most powerful negotiations. It is often not productive or cost-effective for the supply chain team to rely on data and products from one source because it cannot provide best-of-breed data across all high-spend areas.

Other CFOs task their supply chain team with piecing together multiple datasets and products from several different vendors in order to gather the relevant insights they need to make informed decisions about products they are considering purchasing for their health system. When piecing together products from multiple vendors, though, teams frequently discover that the solutions overlap with each other or are not interoperable. This can be a significant drain on the team’s time as they try to make various solutions work together to cover an end-to-end sourcing process.

Adding another layer of challenge, many CFOs are asking supply chain teams to reduce operational expenses by cutting team members. Losing staff can be problematic as supply chain departments are often already struggling to do more with less. If the supply chain team loses members, they may have to employ expensive consultants to bridge resourcing gaps.

Employing Technology to Improve Efficiencies

Supply chain efficiency, resiliency and strategic purchasing power cannot be achieved without the right technology. One of the most important roles a CFOs can play in making the supply chain function more efficient and cost-effective is to guide their supply chain team to identify technologies that best meet the health system’s specific needs while saving the team time and resources.

The most effective solution is one that is designed for the specificity of the health system’s clinical sourcing and spend management needs and seamlessly manages the end-to-end sourcing process, delivering both short-term and long-term ROI and providing flexibility to support future growth. The solution should be deployed on a flexible platform and feed clean and normalized clinical product data into enterprise data lakes and system-wide analytics initiatives which the health system is already using. It should be GPO-neutral and have the ability to seamlessly integrate with solutions and datasets from various best-of-breed providers.

The right solution will have the ability to deliver on the needs of the supply chain team while simultaneously serving the needs of enterprise-wide analytics and digital transformation initiatives – ultimately helping achieve the overall organization goals of cost reduction and operational efficiency. 

Ensuring Supply Chain Success

The future is an integrated supply chain powered by artificial intelligence to fuel greater connectivity between providers and suppliers. Backed by a pipeline of trusted data, the Curvo Platform was architected to be flexible and highly configurable. The Curvo Platform enables multiple best-of-breed datasets and products to work together seamlessly, enabling supply chain teams to quickly and easily gain the competitive insights they need to make informed purchasing decisions for their organizations.

The Curvo Platform uses enriched ERP and clinical information system data which is matched to contracts, master data sources, GUDID and procedure data. The pipeline leverages the company’s proprietary GIC© classification and construct logic for implants and PPI – the gold standard in orthopedics and spine. The Curvo Platform is built on software backed by AI trained primarily by clinicians, empowering visionary supply chain teams with technology that understands the clinical supply chain.

The Curvo Platform offers the flexibility that supply chain teams need to deliver on the goals of both the CFO and the health system and achieve the best possible outcomes. Learn more about the Curvo Platform.

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