It is clear that the healthcare industry is undergoing massive amounts of change, some violent, some subtle. Two recent reports have highlighted this: IDC Health Insights recent survey of ACOs found that the number one investment priority is analytic tools. Given the ACOs’ need to monitor, manage, and predict population health, this is no surprise. [...]

In last week’s blog, “Moving up the Healthcare Value Ladder,” we talked about how important it is for vendors to move away from a price-based mindset, and instead begin aligning with provider goals of improved patient outcomes. To ascend to the top of the value ladder, vendors must be able to answer the question, “How [...]

Computerworld’s Healthcare IT Spotlight blog recently featured an excellent post by Ravi Krishnan, executive director of Kaiser Permanente IT Program Management, entitled, “The four rungs of the healthcare IT value ladder.” As we’ve discussed previously here at Successful Connections, the evolving value-based healthcare marketplace requires that suppliers move away from a purely price-based strategy, and [...]

Standardized vendor performance assessments certainly aren’t new to healthcare, or any other industry for that matter. Typically, buyers are looking to deploy some sort of scoring methodology that uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure specific deliverables to mitigate risk, improve selection criteria, provide incentives, etc. — with the goal of better managing their supplier [...]

The end of the year always brings lists upon lists. Being retrospective they give a snapshot of the past year, but they can also be helpful for setting goals in the New Year. This year’s Gartner, Inc. Healthcare Supply Chain Top 25 poll is particularly noteworthy as our industry moves towards new rules of accountability [...]

One of the topics discussed at the recent GA Health IT Summit was the complexity and pace of change being driven in the healthcare marketplace by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Transformation was the theme of the meeting, and a key pain point in conversations was the changing business models in healthcare to accommodate Accountable [...]

I was reading an excellent blog post recently from The StrategicSourceror, entitled “Supply Chain Flexibility a Necessity.” In it, the author states, “many corporate decision-makers may be surprised to learn that cost reduction isn’t the only thing that’s critical to a successful business … a flexible supply chain may even be more important than slashing [...]

Welcome to Successful Connections, a new blog from Medzo™ that will share news, insights and commentary on issues relating to buyers and sellers in the healthcare supply chain. Medzo™ is a new online sourcing tool from Vendormate that offers buyers and sellers in healthcare a faster, more cost-effective network through which they can connect and [...]