How IT Can Lead Digital Transformation in Clinical Spend Management

As part of broader supply chain transformation, digital innovation has also come to clinical spend management. Informed IT leaders can guide the journey.

Clinical spend management gets overshadowed by more dramatic supply chain headlines, but when it comes to savings and efficiency opportunities, don’t let this function slip under the IT radar.

Digital innovation can transform clinical spend management, and prepared IT leaders can show the way. Be ready to lead these initiatives by knowing what to look and ask for when it comes to clinical spend management software. This article will help IT leaders and innovation officers understand the business need around spend management.

What IT Should Know About the Clinical Spend Tech Stack

As a subset of the healthcare supply chain, clinical spend doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. Within the healthcare supply chain, clinical spend management deals with high-ticket medical devices like implants. This clinical segment requires a different approach than a high-volume PPE supply chain process, for example.

IT leaders need awareness of the technology-related struggles these teams face. Manual processes and lack of good data are two of the biggest hurdles. In response, industry innovators like Curvo have delivered solutions for:

• Data enrichment, normalization, cleansing
• Sourcing analytics and visualization
• Spend management platform
• Contract management automation

Most tech leaders already have solid knowledge of the concepts behind these technologies. This article fills in some basics specific to digital clinical spend management software and data.

These solutions are all available today, and if the supply chain team hasn’t been pushing for them, maybe IT should take the initiative. Here’s why.

Why IT Should Embrace Clinical Spend Management Innovation

Ideally, modern clinical spend management happens on a cloud-based platform where enriched data and software solutions come together. An end-to-end bid environment makes it easy to collaborate, shrink contract cycles, and spot significant savings on high-end medical devices, sometimes with no change of products.

Consolidating the spend management tech stack onto one cloud-based platform benefits the supply chain and makes IT work easier. It simplifies supplier contacts and gives users cloud-based ease of access and administration.

Strong Case for Data Enrichment

Part of the job of healthcare IT leadership is to understand the data flowing in and out of your organization. That includes enriched data used in high-ticket medical device spend analysis and contracts.

Enriched data is valuable for conversations, negotiations and decisions. For successful collaboration and productive engagement with clinicians and supply chain, the health system needs reliable information around clinical products and constructs to fully comprehend usage and cost impact. And everyone needs to speak the same language at the construct level.

Digital Innovation in Spend Management Runs on Gold-Standard Data

Data enrichment, normalization and classification fuel better clinical spend insights and decisions in many ways:

• Standard device classification allows true apples-to-apples comparisons.
• Supply chain teams, suppliers and clinicians can work from the same page when describing devices.
• Strong classifications improve search outcomes in medical device spend management.
• Analysts see higher match rates on item master lists.
• Physicians understand the use of constructs for more accurate usage and spend comparisons.

Curvo data enrichment uses the Generic Implant Classification (GIC©) – the gold standard in clinical product data classification. Curvo Data Enrichment leverages the GIC classification system to easily identify and account for all components (instruments, disposables and implantables) utilized in a procedure and understand the true total case cost.

Curvo is the only spend management innovator to draw on GIC medical device classification for over 1M+ parts and 1,000+ suppliers. Unlike other classifications, GIC category combinations correlate to medical constructs for procedural-level classification.

The ability to easily analyze procedures as a whole adds tremendous value to supply chain workflow.

What to Ask a Technology Partner for Digital Clinical Spend Management

When considering a software partner for digital transformation in clinical spend management, include questions about these topics:

• Data security - SOC2 compliance, data handling chops (generally no PII is involved.)
• Purpose-built application - Robust tool designed to need little-to-no IT hand holding.
• Implementation and user training - Software vendor has a proven, collaborative process.
• Simplified vendor relations - One spend management platform eliminates need to maintain multiple, disjointed relationships with software vendors.
• Cloud-based application - Avoid overbuilding and overprovisioning the data center.
• Efficiency focused - Automation and dashboards eliminate manual spend management work, leaving more bandwidth for other priorities.

The Curvo Platform measures up in each of these areas.

You can test drive the Curvo Platform from the convenience of your office. Just reach out, to set up a no-obligation demo.

Try the Curvo Platform