2025 Southeastern Residency Conference

Title: Developing Pharmacy Processes for a National Group Purchasing Organization in Non-Acute Settings
Authors: Samantha Randlett, Alyssa Huff, Jason Braithwaite
Objective: Identify and assess components of GPO and supply chain processes that will enhance value for non-acute members.
Self-Assessment Question: How can we identify value and cost savings provided back to non-acute members that are part of a group purchasing organization?
Background: Group purchasing organizations (GPOs) have improved contracting performance and have added value to acute care facilities for many years. They do this by bringing the power of negotiation for all buyers into a unified community and provide leverage to strongly bargain with manufacturers, distributors, and vendors in the supply chain. With new healthcare policies pushing patients to receive care at lower-cost sites, healthcare leaders require adaptation to support migration to the non-acute care space. As GPOs are evolving to offer additional services and analytical insights and savings for their members, the non-acute space becomes an important area to understand.
Methods: This is a process improvement study focused on pre-specified rostered non-acute members that were active in both periods. Non-acute care sites consist of ambulatory surgery centers, physician clinics, home care, long term care, and other. Utilizing the baseline knowledge HealthTrust has on how to achieve cost savings, streamline processes, and optimize the supply chain in the acute space will allow the ability to translate into the non-acute space. Baseline data of non-acute purchases were assessed from August 2023 to January 2024. Discussions with non-acute facilities and vendors were started in August 2024. This process involved engaging manufacturers, distributors and educating members on how to optimize purchasing. The goal of this process improvement study is to provide value around specific drugs by identifying the class of trade nuances to optimize purchasing. The primary outcome is percentage of on-contract spend improvement. The secondary outcomes include important metrics such as manufacturer and distributor alignment and new contract value. To ensure better control on potential variables such as seasonality, results are based on the same timeline one year later; August 2024 to January 2025. 
Results and Conclusions: Our preliminary results demonstrate the challenges and time required to ensure on-contract purchasing whether utilizing a current contract or obtaining a new one. From period 1 to period 2, there is an increase of 8% in overall total spend and increase in membership by 15%. When reviewing on-contract purchasing between periods, there is a decrease by 19% due to new visibility in data, addition of clinics within current members, contract negotiations, and overall delay in contract load after relationships are developed. Chargeback relationship awareness increased by 100% and no contract exists increased by 23%. While these are our preliminary results, this shows the continued importance to improve pharmacy processes within the GPO in the non-acute space.