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At Saint Luke's Health System, supply chain leaders and physicians are working together to achieve significant savings across a range of departments and subspecialties.
In 2013, Saint Luke's Health System in Kansas City, Mo., launched a novel cost-reduction initiative that relies not on top-down, administrative mandates, but on tight collaboration between supply chain managers and physician-led, evidence-based practice teams that have standardized care for all procedures performed and morbidities treated.
Applying pressure to vendors to reduce cost is the key strategy in this initiative, particularly when it comes to medical supplies. The mark-up from the distributors to healthcare systems is an expense not seen for the same products in retail care setting.3 By linking specialty-specific clinical teams with supply chain experts, Saint Luke's Health System established costcontainment strategies that align with clinical pathways and create new negotiating power with vendors. At the same time, physician engagement in the process helped ensure clinicians remain committed to sustaining the cost-containment initiatives over time. In several instances, physicians have led the way in formulating cost-cutting ideas that have exceeded the best-case expectations of supply chain administrators.
Since the initiative was launched in January ?oi3, Saint Luke's reduced medical supply costs by more than $6 million. The lessons learned in this collaborative journey illustrate the importance of engaging both physicians and supply chain experts in the development and execution of cost-reduction strategies.
How Saint Luke's Did It
Saint Luke's vision for cost reduction originated with Saint Luke's Care (SLC), a volunteer physician quality organization created in 2007. From its inception, SLC's role has been to help physicians make collective decisions about how to most effectively implement standardized best practices across the health system. The organization today includes about 63o physicians, or about 75 percent of the physicians employed by or affiliated with Saint Luke's Health System.
Since 2007,10 evidence-based practice teams assembled around each subspecialty or disease state have successfully implemented systemwide policies, clinical pathways, and more than 400 order sets. In addition to reviewing clinical research to ensure that treatment pathways and order sets remain up to date, SLC also is responsible for educating physicians via newsletters, emails, phone calls, group meetings, and continuing medical education about the ongoing evolution of evidence-based care across the system.
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