Unfortunately, these spreadsheets are a part of doing business. Fortunately, there are many ways to turn that spreadsheet filled with 20,000 lines of data into a graphic so simple anyone can see the patterns and trends that lie deep within the data and can help to reduce costs for an organization.
The healthcare industry is unique when it comes to purchasing. A majority of the time, there are multiple vendors that are providing an organization with the same products and services. Do you know what vendors have the strongest influence on your bottom line? Are you doing the research to make sure you are getting the best pricing for the amount of business you are awarding to a certain vendor? If Vendor A and Vendor B are both providing you with a similar product how do you know which you should be getting the best deal from?
Knowing the vendor landscape of your organization is crucial to getting the most bang for your buck and a simple pie chart can turn $30,000,000 spend report into a road map for vendor negotiations. For instance, referring to the graph below, you can clearly tell that Vendor B makes up nearly 50% of the market within your organization. Now, seeing the data represented in a new fashion rather than just lines on a spreadsheet, you can walk into a negotiation with Vendor B and expect your organization to get a better deal than you would from any other vendor. Having this knowledge can greatly assist an organization’s efforts to drive down costs and return valuable dollars back to it’s bottom line.
Product replacement, another common practice in the healthcare industry, can be easily spotted on a graph but not necessarily easy to recognize when scrolling down a spreadsheet. Vendors are consistently coming up with new and innovative products pushing old product out of the market, but how do you note these trends before they actually happen and your organization is stuck with shelves of outdated product? You can manually go through lines of data hoping that you may be able to spot when one product is on its way out of the market and a new one is replacing it, or you can utilize a line graph like the one seen below. Referencing the graph below, you can see that Product 1A was heavily used at the beginning of the year but after the 1st quarter volumes had begun to drop. Likewise, Product 1B had steady growth in the first quarter and by the middle of the 2nd quarter had surpassed Product 1A’s volumes. The earlier you can catch the trends like this, the better your organization will be at reducing costs through reducing unused product purchase and discussing product discounts in contract negotiations.
Being able to condense large amounts of data into a simple graph or chart can drastically alter what you might have thought the numbers were showing you. Deep within the data provided in the lines of a spreadsheet is a story waiting to be told. Many of us do not have the time to analyze every line of every spreadsheet that pops into our inbox but it’s the ones who take the time to look deeper into the data and spot the trends in the market that will end up on top.
Steven Frank is a Senior Healthcare Business Analyst at VIE Healthcare and supports the mission of hospitals throughout the United States.
The views, opinions and positions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Becker’s Hospital Review/Becker’s Healthcare. The accuracy, completeness and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with them.
