Health Transformation Alliance Looking to Disrupt Healthcare for Its Employees

When 20 of the United States’ largest companies (including American Express, Coca-Cola and Verizon) announced the formation of the Health Transformation Alliance that covers approximately four million people, they got everyone’s attention. In creating the Alliance, the companies have banded together to use their collective data and market power in a bid to hold down the cost of health-care benefits.

Alliance members intend to share information about employee health spending and outcomes, with a goal to use those findings to change how they contract for care. According to the Wall Street Journal, some members say they might even form a purchasing cooperative to negotiate for lower prices, or attempt to change their relationships with insurance administrators and drug-benefit managers.

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What Healthcare Executives Can Learn from P&G

Procter & Gamble (P&G), the world’s largest consumer-products company that aggressively expanded for years, recently announced that it will sell more than half of its brands.

Are you asking what this has to do with healthcare? Well, a lot actually.

Just like many of today’s health systems, P&G is in a very competitive and changing market. While it was successful under its former strategy for many, many years, leadership realized that the best way to continue to lead the market was to become more nimble. As Lindsey Dunn quoted in a recent Becker’s Hospital Review blog post, the idea is to “create a faster growing, more profitable company that’s far simpler to operate.”

in Becker's Hospital Review / Blog / Changes in Healthcare / Consolidation / Delivery System Change / Future of Healthcare 0 comments

What Do Healthcare Supply Chain Managers Think? Part II – Introduction to our second roundtable discussion

In the spring, we conducted a roundtable discussion with top healthcare supply chain leaders to discuss their healthcare transportation needs. We had a lively, two hour discussion that left us with a key takeaway: supply chain leaders are looking for ways to transform their healthcare transportation operations from a tactical, commodity-based service to a strategic asset that can help them better navigate the changing healthcare landscape.

With the rapid changes we are experiencing in healthcare, we decided to conduct a follow up to see if the discussion has changed. So, at the 2012 Fall IDN Summit in Phoenix, AZ, we gathered another group of top healthcare supply chain leaders and asked them to talk about their current supply chain and healthcare transportation needs and challenges.

The Supreme Court has spoken: Now what?

Like many of you, I was in a meeting Thursday morning when one of the smart phones pinged with news of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act. And, I would imagine, like many of you, we stopped what we were doing to talk about it. No surprise there since this has been on the minds of all of us in healthcare and of many, if not most, of our fellow Americans. After all, no less perhaps than the future makeup of U.S. healthcare was at stake.

So, now that there is a decision, what does it mean? Well, regardless of political leanings or personal opinions, there are two main points of consensus, in my opinion: