System Director for Purchased Services and Laboratory Sourcing,
Providence St. Joseph Health
August 2023- The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Andrew Maze is the System Director for Purchased Services and Laboratory Sourcing for The Resource, Engineering and Hospitality Group of Providence Health in Renton, Washington. This includes EVS along with all non-medical products and services. He supports a team of highly knowledgeable and skilled contract managers and contract administrators that are 100% focused on the mission of Providence.
What are some stories of recent supply chain wins/successful projects you can share?
We’ve had some big ones. Last year, we completed one of the largest Oracle Cloud transitions in healthcare for an ERP system. We just went live with our final wave, which was successful and is now being stabilized.
Our lab team negotiated a system-wide reference lab agreement, which saved Providence an excess of $6 million. We are now on a fully integrated and interfaced reference lab program with one of the national leading Reference Labs. We now have the majority of our send-out and esoteric testing going to them which resulted in conversion away from several other labs. This work created a ton of transactional efficiencies as well because we now have one preferred trading partner that we’re fully aligned with.
We also helped lower our contingent labor spend by tens of millions of dollars as part of our post COVID-19 Respond and Recover Initiative. We are seeing bill rates for travel and per diem lowered by anywhere from 30% to 40%, along with increases in new hires and retention. All of this mitigates the premium labor spend, which is not sustainable under the current reimbursement environment.
Lastly, as a combined purchased services team, we achieved 135% of our savings goals for FY 2022 and we have continued to build our culture and establish efficient processes.
How do you measure the success of your team and its impact on the organization as a whole?
Our primary measurement is confirming that the products and services we have sourced support our staff in delivering exceptional patient care to our communities. This is an essential component to the advancement of our mission, and it’s a critical success factor for us. Providence’s mission is based upon compassion and empathy, caring for the most poor and vulnerable in society. The products and services that we source are essential to delivering on that.
So, that’s our first measurement of success. We ask:
- Did we perform care for our communities?
- Did we provide community support the way that we needed to that’s aligned with our historical practice of doing so?
The second part involves measuring savings attainment and procure-to-pay transactional efficiency – both of which lead to a lower economic burden for the organization. Our goal is to create a healthy, well-sourced and well-integrated supply chain environment. So, are we managing our supply ecosystem well? Are we creating back-office efficiencies to make the system run better than it’s ever run?
Part of that was the ERP deployment to modernize our tools and modernize the foundation and information systems for which we do everything.
The third thing that we measure success on is retention. Are we caring for those that are caring for others? Are we caring for our staff, or are they burning out? Are they feeling disengaged in their work and disconnected overall? We are surveying all the time with our employee engagement survey, and making sure that we understand the policy organization. We’re monitoring retention, and we’re monitoring career advancement for our staff to ensure that they’re well-engaged and that they have opportunity.
What’s the biggest takeaway for you as a supply chain leader over the last few years of marketplace disruptions?
Relationships are still key. When everything is backed up at a port or completely on back order, it will be the relationships you have cultivated with your supplier partners that will allow for innovation and joint problem solving.
You never know when you’re going to need to rely on those relationships. I had relationships during the pandemic that I had to rely on that were established back when I was doing marketing for a distributor 15 years ago. Some of those companies were Tier C suppliers, but they were the ones who bailed us out. For instance, at one point during the pandemic, I couldn’t get nasal swabs. I knew the CEO of a domestic manufacturer, so I called and told him we needed 200,000 swabs. Within a week they were delivering. Those types of relationships and those actions will never be forgotten.
During the pandemic, I got every single one of our testing suppliers on the same command center call, and we went one to one to one with them. They all gave a report as to where their inventory was, where their production was at, and what they were going to supply us for that week. If one couldn’t supply, we went to the other, and the other was able to work it out. We had suppliers that normally compete on the same call, working as a team to meet the needs of our health system during the pandemic. I don’t know of any other health system that did that, but we did.
Second to this is the need for every supply chain leader to ensure they are taking care of themselves as people. This is hard work, and it’s easy for leaders who are constantly fighting fires to feel a sense of burn out.
What are the most important attributes of a successful supply chain team today?
Integrity, thoughtfulness, compassion/empathy, resilience, analytical acumen, and responsiveness.
A lot of those are behavior traits, some are character traits, and some are skill. When we look for somebody, we want to know, do they take initiative? Are they proactive? Do they have the integrity that the organization expects out of all our caregivers and represents our mission? Is it all about them, or do they have compassion and empathy for the needs of others?
And do they have the analytical and negotiation prowess, to be able to take on key suppliers? Because we’re a multi-billion-dollar supply chain, we have the best of the best from these companies hired to call on us, and we must put the right leaders in place that know how to hold their own and be strong negotiators and strong strategists. Otherwise, they’re going to meet with the supplier, and they’re going to begin having those discussions and they’re not going to be able to advance initiatives. We are really looking for that knowledge worker who knows how to solve problems and apply critical thinking skills to their work. I have to say that we have so many of these individuals and it’s an honor to work with them.