Jennifer (Norfleet) Taylor
Manager, Contracts
Universal Health Services, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
About Jennifer Taylor:
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Jennifer Taylor majored in business administration and management at Penn State, then began a six-year career as a contract manager with the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the nation’s fourth largest public housing authority. She managed contracts for various purchased services, including construction, architectural engineering and phlebotomy services; and life-skills services, such as GED training and certification.
“After about six years of valuable learning in that role, I felt the need for a new challenge, where I could impact people on a deeper level, and applied at UHS,” she says. “Initially I did not know much about healthcare; however, I found that sourcing and contracting knowledge is transferable across industries, so I sought to learn new vendors, terms and conditions, specifics of the healthcare industry, and the overall operations of UHS.”
About UHS:
Universal Health Services is one of the nation’s largest hospital management companies, with 27 acute care hospitals, nine freestanding emergency departments, six ambulatory surgery centers and surgery hospitals, and more than 300 behavioral health facilities, across the U.S., Puerto Rico and the U.K.
Most interesting/challenging project in the past 12-18 months:
Designing, implementing and managing the supply chain department internship program. “UHS has a corporate internship program, but I wanted to create a structured program for supply chain, in which we would expand the meaningful work being done by our interns,” she says. “I worked with our human resources department to attend career fairs and speak at college classes to help promote UHS and create a robust program.”
The department assisted in identifying projects that interns could focus on throughout the summer that related to current course work, including six sigma training, contract terms and conditions, and request-for-proposal experience, she explains. As a result, this year’s summer interns visited ECRI Institute, the medical device research firm; a local Staples warehouse (to assist interns’ understanding of an RFP for promotional supplies on which UHS was working); as well as various departments within supply chain and UHS.
“We are currently in Year 2 and have an established program that feeds into our career ladder and includes a pool of highly qualified candidates.”
Looking forward to:
Taylor has assisted with the development, implementation and management of UHS’s in-house contract management system (known as the Enterprise Contract Management system, or ECM), which encompasses all 300 of UHS’s facilities as well as the corporate office. Now she is looking forward to enhancing the system, to align with the supply chain strategy pillar of process improvement.
Although UHS is a member of Premier, local facilities are responsible for some of their own contracts, particularly, purchased services such as landscaping, lithotripsy, snow removal, etc. “We’re really going to look at the entire picture of these contracts,” she says. Using ECM, the corporate team reviews terms and conditions, with a special eye for unfavorable terms, such as harsh termination fees or automatic renewals, and, of course, pricing.
“This system facilitates the review and tracking of all contracts,” she says. To date, about 3,000 contracts have been routed for review. “Previously our process was a bit limited in functionality and lacked cohesion. We are working across the enterprise to make the overall process more streamlined, minimize the number of systems in use, include robust reporting, and provide a more user-friendly experience.”
Biggest challenge/change facing healthcare supply chain professionals in the next 5 years:
Increased pressure from payers to lower the cost of procedure components – thereby putting further pressure on healthcare providers to negotiate with vendors. “We recently saw this with our total joint initiative,” she says. “We had to be extremely diligent in order to drive down costs with vendors while accommodating the requests of the surgeons. The challenge is to develop resourceful, win-win approaches to address these situations and maintain strategic relationships.”