September 30, 2026- When William V.S. Thorne created the Hospital Bureau of Standards & Supplies Inc. in New York in 1910 to serve a small group of local hospitals, he likely didn’t envision that his concept of “cooperative buying,” would blossom into the multibillion-dollar group purchasing industry it is today.
It’s much like President George Washington in the late 1790s could not have predicted how the grand experiment of launching and running a representative democracy or democratic republic form of government in the New World that emerged from the rejection of a monarchy and aristocracy in the Old World would last and arguably progress 250 years later. [Granted, that Old World government is a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy today.]
But group purchasing (116!) as well as the United States of America (250!) are here and here to stay. God bless them both.
Thorne was a small railroad executive at a time when the railroad barons who dominated transportation during the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century were already starting to fade and see their fiscal and societal influence diminish in the early 20th by President Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive policies and trustbusting antics, coupled with newly emerging forms of transportation turning heads, including cars, trucks and airplanes.
Continue Reading in the latest issue of The Journal of Healthcare Contracting.