Jim Marziale
Jim Marziale
- Senior vice president of account management, Intalere
- Intalere consists of 88,817 members, including acute-care and non-acute care sites.
Jim Marziale joined Intalere (previously Amerinet) in 2014, after serving as vice president of clinical operations at Cardinal Health for seven years. He moved into his current position at Intalere in September 2015, after Intermountain Healthcare purchased Amerinet. Today, he oversees the organization’s acute care field sales team, alliance and affiliate management group, field specialist team and onsite resource agents.
The Journal of Healthcare Contracting: What has been the most challenging and rewarding project you have been involved in recently?
Jim Marziale: Intalere is transforming itself into a professional supply chain company, with the mission of elevating the operational health of our members. This is an organizational strategy set by [recently retired] CEO, Brent Johnson. For the last nine months, I have solely focused on reorganizing our company to achieve this vision. Our intention is to be disruptive to the healthcare industry in positive ways that only our company can achieve.
JHC: Please describe a project you look forward to implementing in the next year or two.
Marziale: We look forward to two important projects: our Outpatient Pharmacy/PBM program and our Total Cost of Ownership utilization program. Outpatient pharmacy is an important issue in healthcare for a number of reasons. First, the average number of prescription drugs taken regularly by Americans 18 years or older is 2.2 and growing. A segment that fuels this growth in outpatient care is the expensive, complicated specialty pharmacy area. When systems evaluate their population health strategies, their outpatient pharmacy operations are inevitably at the top of the list for discussion. As a provider-owned GPO, Intalere is uniquely positioned to bring value and creativity to this space, in part because our owner, Intermountain Healthcare, understands this space and is an owner/operator of a provider benefits management (PBM) solution. Total cost of ownership (TCO) utilization is, in our view, the next frontier in supply chain management, and it offers the biggest impact in accomplishing the triple aim: cost-quality-outcomes. Some thought leaders have stated that TCO supply utilization is the biggest cost-driver for healthcare organizations (greater than 67 percent), with a potential per-line product savings of 22 to 41 percent above price. This concept is often practiced only in capital expenditure procurement. It needs to be expanded to products, services and technologies, with the goal of driving new savings and efficiencies by focusing on in-use total cost. Our new industry paradigm – value based purchasing (VBP) – and the CMS-stated goal to link 90 percent of its reimbursement to VBP by 2018, demands we look at supply chain management differently. Intermountain has championed this philosophy in its supply chain management operations for years, and it has results to show for it. Intalere plans to share these best practices, as well as develop new tools and methodologies, to deploy to its membership.
JHC: What are the most important qualities you look for in a supplier partner?
Marziale: We look for altruism, transparency, creativity and the ability to execute.
JHC: What is the greatest change we can expect to see in healthcare contracting in the next five years?
Marziale: We will see a shift from the narrow view of utilization of contracts to the more comprehensive view of total cost of ownership utilization.