Expert Services: Curvo’s Hands-on Approach

As is the case for many healthcare supply chain teams who are down a headcount, it is incredibly challenging for them to tackle savings opportunities in all areas. Additionally, many health systems have to put savings opportunities on the back burner to focus on enormous projects, such as the recent example of COVID-19 sourcing.

For healthcare systems in situations like these, Curvo’s Expert Services offerings allow us to assign a savings expert to a health system’s internal supply chain team. This gives them an insider view and ensures the health system’s supply chain is able to realize all savings opportunities.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how a Curvo savings expert helped one health system realize $650k in savings – and open up future opportunities:

How One Healthcare System Benefited From Curvo’s Expert Services

Today’s success story centers on a regional health system that has been a Curvo customer since mid 2019. Near the start of 2020, the healthcare system began taking advantage of Curvo’s Expert Services offering and was assigned a savings expert.

The Curvo savings expert worked directly with this regional health system and even received a hospital email address (let’s say “steve@abchealth.org”), thus giving him the appearance of an insider. This standard practice allowed the Curvo savings expert to use his intimate knowledge of what the system is able to do while leveraging insider access, appearing to clients and vendors as a member of the in-house supply chain team.

Once the savings expert connected to the health system’s supply chain database, he logged in through Outlook, chose a couple of categories that were ripe for repricing, and got to work.

Identifying a Target

Curvo makes it easy to identify the spend categories that should be high priorities for cost savings initiatives. Curvo’s savings expert worked to identify areas for significant savings impact.

One area targeted for significant savings was the on-site pharmacy. The pharmacy was set up to do its own specialty compounding – something that carries some considerable cost. A compounding pharmacy requires both equipment and materials that other pharmacies don’t. And, there’s also a staffing or training component.

As the Curvo savings expert dove into the data, he discovered that the pharmacy was not actually doing any specialty compounding – and had not done so for years.

The savings expert analyzed the spend going toward supporting in-house specialty compounding, determining that this spend level was significant. He also identified outside vendors who could support this limited need at a far lower spend level.

Finding a Solution

Within a day, the Curvo savings expert received a call from a representative at a potential vendor in the compounding pharmacy arena – one that had already been trying to get a meeting with the health system’s leadership. Both the outside vendor and the Curvo savings expert agreed that there was the potential for $650k in savings in just this one area. In this case, the representative had already done the legwork (his company wanted the business, of course). He’d prepared the document, which outlined the possibility of savings.

However, the health system’s supply chain VP struggled to understand how the $650k savings was a real figure. He rightly questioned, “if we’re not even doing compounding, why would we spend on an outside contract for compounding?”

A Break in the Case

The external vendor rep had hit a brick wall. But the internal Curvo savings expert made a breakthrough. The Curvo rep again contacted the supply chain VP, this time looping in the health system’s director of strategic sourcing for his point of view. As a person more directly involved with sourcing and spend, the director was excited about this possibility.

He immediately called the pharmacy to confirm. The pharmacy verified that they hadn’t done any compounding for years. With this new, correct information from a trusted internal source, the VP was eager to sign the document.

$650k in Savings Realized, Quickly

Within a little over two weeks, the health system realized $650k in savings spanning just four products from a single manufacturer, in a single document. Curvo’s Expert Services team delivered a 5.5X return on investment. And the healthcare system freed up over half a million dollars of spend, which could then be used elsewhere.

The remarkable takeaway is that this savings was realized very quickly, despite internal resistance at a very high level.

Curvo’s Results Compared to Your Current Solution

How do the results described here compare to your current clinical spend management partner? This particular health system already had systems in place. But those systems didn’t allow them to easily see the savings opportunities in compounding. This was a spend problem that they could have solved. But they may have never found it or had time to focus on it on their own.

Curvo brought this information to the surface, quickly and easily. And it gave the provider the data they needed to execute this impressive cost-savings initiative.

If your healthcare organization could benefit from these kinds of insights, schedule a demo today!