$1 Billion in Hospital Financial Improvements | E. 98

A focus on frontline innovation has kept VIE Healthcare at the forefront of hospital cost savings for 25 years. Lisa Miller shares her formula for success with Jim Cagliostro. 

 

Episode Introduction 

Lisa outlines how getting to the line-item details in purchased services was the key to early success, the ‘what-if’ questions that led to patents, and why hospitals should never settle for 10% in savings when digging deeper might lead to 25%. She also explains why letting the data speak takes the emotion out of vendor meetings, and why hospitals need to work with companies that will ‘’run after every dollar’’ of cost savings.

 

Show Topics

 

• 25 years of adapting to change in healthcare

• Paying attention to detail and a focus on data

• Cost savings innovation comes from ‘’what-if’’?

• Hospitals have one shot at cost savings

• Allowing the data to speak at contract renewal

• A comprehensive cost-savings solution with SpendMend

 

 

03:50 25 years of adapting to change in healthcare 

Lisa said VIE had focused on finding cost savings in purchased services from the beginning.  

‘’25 years ago, I knew I wanted to be different. So the difference was, for me, that we would go into an AP department and we would copy invoices. So we literally would say, we don't need anything from your team. We're not going to be disruptive. We're going to go in, we're going to copy invoices, and then from those copying invoices and copying the contracts, we're going to find cost savings. So you won't even see us. We're going to, in the back room, get the data and we're going to come back to you. And that works great. I felt like that was a big differentiator because working with the CFOs and the COOs are like, "Really?" And I'm like, "Yeah, just give me a day, give me two days, we'll bring a couple of people in, and then within less than two, three weeks, we're going to already have opportunities." So that was, in my mind, the least amount of friction that we could get to working with the C-suite, and that, for them, too, they can get buy-in. Obviously, they have to task their team with this. So the most they would have to do is tell somebody in accounting, they're going to be onsite and they're going to copy invoices and contracts. That was the worst case scenario. …. So what happened is, accidentally, because we copied all the invoices, we were 24 or five years ago already started to look at purchase services because others in this space, other consulting firms would ask for a PO detail report and they would focus on that PO detail report for their cost savings. So the purchase services would come up as just the header data and a total spend… they would never even look at it.’ 

 

07:08 Paying attention to detail and a focus on data 

Lisa said a desire to do the work and getting down to line-item details are two differentiators for VIE. 

‘’…we are so detailed-focused, and so when you asked your initial question how we see change or how I view that, it started with how do we support hospitals for success? And so my lens on it was always to make things easy to... be easy to work with, get the data. And then over time, as people saw, like what you said, just our desire, our roll up your sleeves, we get to the details approach. We're not looking at ratios. In the