Challenges: A Varied and Growing Ambulatory Surgical Center Enterprise with a Complex Inventory System
As a leader in healthcare procurement software, Procurement Partners has honed our services by combining experience and expertise with responsiveness and an attentive ear to the needs of our ever-growing client base. Our automated solutions are comprehensive and always evolving, focused on concrete results in spend management and the procurement-to-pay process so that healthcare organizations can spend more time on their mission of care and less on ordering, managing, and invoicing for supplies.
Solara Surgical Partners is a valued customer that trusts Procurement Partners with all elements of its procurement process. It’s among the healthcare organizations that enjoy up to 40 percent time savings and 95 percent contract compliance through Procurement Partners’ easy-to-use portal and automated solutions.
Procurement Partners has carved out a strong niche in non-acute and post-acute care and senior living. The time savings that Procurement Partners makes possible enables the higher mission of healthcare groups such as Solara Surgical Partners.
The Oklahoma City and Southlake, Texas-based Solara Surgical Partners serves in partnership, development, and operations management for seven Ambulatory Surgical Centers (ASC) and six urgent care and primary care facilities with related expertise in mobile care and telemedicine.
Solara Surgical Partners’ mission is expanding community access to value-based healthcare service alternatives within a broad range of specialties, delivering on this promise through its affiliates by offering safe, efficient, and consumer-centric healthcare services. It pursues its goals through strong company values of relationships, ethical excellence, and expertise.
As a healthcare company such as Solara Surgical Partners grows and evolves, so do its procurement challenges: alignment and standardization of categories in procurement and inventory; identifying contract versus non-contract supplies when preparing orders; and accessing accurate and relevant reports for suppliers and vendors to identify comparative information and negotiating opportunities.
With a widening range of services, and a new facility partnership happening in 2023, the company faces demands that are both complex and ever-evolving in a constantly changing landscape.
Solutions: Alignment in Inventory, Data, and Customized Procurement Categories
As Solara Surgical Partners’ Director of Corporate Procurement, Jeff Bibb brings extensive experience in the healthcare sphere to his role. Based on Jeff’s experiences, accountable inventory, data, and reporting are key elements needed to be successful.
“I’ve been in the healthcare scene for over thirty years and having a good inventory system is very important to me,” Jeff says. “I’ve gotten more and more familiar with Procurement Partners’ Hybrent platform and the reporting structures within it, as well as its ability to make sure items are on contract, which takes the worry out of contract compliance. I’ve been realizing everything that it’s capable of, and I’ve become more and more impressed with it.”
Because he has team members placing orders for goods across Solara Surgical Partners’ numerous facilities, Jeff needs solutions that are tailored to his particular needs, such as the alignment of categories in the procurement process. He’s been able to work with the Procurement Partners team to find custom solutions.
“I wanted to compare categories, and compare products with whatever GL codes I can,” Jeff explains. “So what I have been doing is going in to assign appropriate categories. Procurement Partners has been going back in for me and putting in the categories I need—such as drapes, dressings, equipment service, whatever I need—and aligning that for my systems at the centers and working with personnel that does the ordering, to educate them about why we’re doing this and how to use it.”
Procurement Partners brings value both through its human expertise as well as its technological solutions. As a result, Jeff’s team at Solara Surgical Partners has a standardized procurement solution that empowers even backup staff to clearly understand ordering procedures. In anticipation, Jeff and his team also worked ahead of time with Procurement Partners to make sure they were loading relevant, applicable, and accurate data into the system for best implementation.
Jeff also cites Hybrent’s contract compliance capabilities as beneficial for his team for managing costs and keeping tabs on procurement activity.
“When you have that contract piece in place, you’re able to make sure you are ordering within the contract realm and not getting away from it,” Jeff adds. “It’ll tell you when something isn’t on contract. We all know, in the medical field, sometimes you have to order something not on contract because of need. But overall, it keeps you in line.”
Results: Impactful Reporting, Integration with Finance, and Confident Company Expansion
With the granular and comprehensive data capabilities Solara Surgical Partners are enjoying, a greater line of sight in spend has become a reality. Jeff runs reports identifying data from top suppliers and vendors, which allows him to compare facilities while increasing his group negotiating opportunities.
“With these reports, you can really dial in,” Jeff says. “We do want to track our top ten vendors and our top ten spend. All of these things come in handy. Especially, let’s say, you’re over budget for a month and you don’t really know why. You can take your report and compare it to the report that the business office is looking at for the financial revenue cycle. Maybe you ordered something that got put in the wrong bucket somewhere along the line, or maybe we just had to order more of something to keep the product coming in. These are the tools that I’m grooming my team with.”
This responsiveness, transparency, and accountability make for clearer and more efficient integration between the procurement process and the financial office.
“Our financial people are actually accessing the system, so they’re able to go in and see what purchase orders we have open, which is good,” Jeff says. “I can go into Hybrent and give access to, for instance, an Accounts Payable person who’s trying to understand what’s back-ordered. They can jump in there and say, OK, this all makes sense.”
Jeff also cites the Hybrent phone app as a huge asset for his team, another factor that he’s relying on as Solara Surgical Partners takes part in opening a new facility in the months to come.
“As we move through this implementation, I like seamless, perfect stuff to happen,” Jeff says. My plan is to have no hiccups. And what I like about the Hybrent platform is that it’s a team effort. The Procurement Partners team is so amazing. We’re always able to communicate. I can contact them and say, Hey, I’m struggling with this or that, what about this idea?”
Ultimately, procurement solutions come down to supporting crucial staff in their caregiving mission. Better, simpler, and more accountable processes mean more time spent on the core mission. Jeff is acutely aware of how he empowers staff across the scope of Solara Surgical Partners.
“I’m not going to be at each center working. I’m at the management company, but I’m driven to get it right,” Jeff says. “In a lot of the ASC settings, you have only one person that does the orders. And that person is also an X-ray tech or a surgical tech. They may not have time to get to that order until later that day at three in the afternoon, and they may have to pick up their kids at 3:30. They might have just 15 minutes to do the orders. So having a system that is simple, efficient, and accurate with alignment on all of the important things, it’s just crucial.”