Women’s Care Florida is a specialty physician group that supports 350,000 patients annually. They have more than 360 providers who focus care on obstetrics and gynecology health issues, breast surgery and genetic counseling, and recently acquired a group of fertility clinics in southern California that they will be adding to the Hybrent platform.
Hitesh Shah, WCF’s Director of Purchasing, is responsible for the Hybrent platform in all of their locations in addition to the managing organization’s medical supply chain. He is also responsible for medical and office equipment leasing and buying, service contracts, biomedical waste disposal, mailing machines and shredding.
Hitesh started working at WCF after Hybrent was purchased and installed, but before it had been set up to be used. While learning his new job, he was quickly trained on Hybrent and was responsible for getting the software set up for WCF – not an easy feat!
“When I joined the company, there was no handoff from my predecessor, so I had to build everything from scratch,” he said. With both accounting and purchasing in his background, Hitesh hit the ground running.
To get the information on vendors, products and sku and pricing information, Hitesh worked closely with the accounting team to collect the data needed. He contacted all of WCF’s vendors to obtain material usage reports from the previous year and to help him understand their business better. Once he tracked down all of the information, he passed to the Hybrent team for uploading into the platform.
“Our biggest goal for the system was to go paperless,” Hitesh said. “Because WCF has so many locations, this was a must-have. Having Hybrent integrate with our Sage 100 software online was especially important to our accounting team.” With ordering, receiving and invoicing paperless, it was easier for accounting to reconcile the documents and pay invoices in a timely fashion. “Vendors were happy with us for paying on time, which allowed us to save money by negotiating better pricing as a good customer,” Hitesh said.
He does admit that being new, implementation was probably more challenging than normal. “But my contact at Hybrent was great at getting back to me right away, so we had great communication from the start. Even today, that person gets back to me right away.”
“But once everything was set up in Hybrent, it was a very smooth process,” Hitesh notes. Each WCF location had one or two people ordering the medical and office supplies and someone assigned to approve the orders when placed. When the items arrived at the location and were received, the invoice was immediately sent to accounting for payment – we were able to complete all of this online with Hybrent.
Hitesh and his team have been very happy with Hybrent and it’s easy for him to explain why.
“The first thing is accountability,” he said. “We can get reports on which items are being ordered and how often. I have a monthly purchasing report by location and vendor to track any changes that may occur,” he said.
“And secondly, contracted item prices are loaded into Hybrent so we know they are correct. If a vendor sends an invoice for the wrong amount, it is easy to find and address the issue immediately. We are totally in control of that pricing based on the contract we have with the supplier,” Hitesh said. “Hybrent is helpful for everything!”