A Value Analysis Team Worth Watching: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Value analysis teams are integral parts of the healthcare ecosystem. Although they can be considered “behind the scenes,” these teams and leaders are making everything work with tight budgets, staffing shortages, and all of the other pressures hospitals and health systems are facing today. No project is too big or too small for successful value analysis teams, as one such leader explains to Healthcare Purchasing News. 

Gloria Graham, DNP, RN, CVAHP is the manager of Value Analysis, Contracts, & Value Analysis/Supply Chain Management at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Graham said that she started her career in nursing and transitioned into value analysis and supply chain. She’s been in the industry for 35 years.

When asked about what recent successful projects she’s worked on, she said, “The value analysis team [at Cincinnati Children’s], even though it's me and just two nurses, partner very closely with our sourcing department and the buyers. Anything that we do as a whole, we are successful as a result of that team approach.”

Indeed, “Sourcing can’t work on finding cost saving projects and initiatives without going through us and we can’t identify something without pulling in our sourcing partners, and that’s one thing I really like about our structure, that it’s not just value analysis. We are part of a bigger structure under supply chain that really helps us to be successful."

“Over the past year,” she continued, “one of the goals we hit is what I think is really great and strong work by our sourcing team. We reached a goal of $15 million in savings over this past fiscal year. That’s a significant amount of savings for our organization that you know is going to help continue to sustain us and those goals that we have every year that we work toward.”

Graham added, “One of the goals for our department that we’ve worked on was looking at IV pumps for our organization. While it's not necessarily something as far as a cost savings initiative, these types of projects are so important for value analysis to be involved with and being involved from the very beginning. My perspective is we try to be clinically integrated so that we know when these types of projects are on the radar for the clinical staff and the frontline staff so that we can be involved and help guide and be there as a resource as they're going through this.”

Graham added that her team set up the very early stages of vendor fairs or supplier fairs for this project. This was to solicit clinicians for their opinions. 

“We have to keep in mind the overall cost, but we have to ensure the safety of the pump, the advocacy, the efficiency and how the staff use it,” she notes.

Graham went on to explain that these fairs are set up for larger projects, as well. They’re generally set up in the organization’s auditorium or conference rooms. The value analysis team works with the sourcing team to identify the suppliers that are in the market and, at the time, during the IV pump project, five vendors were brought in and 120 clinicians came in throughout the day. They spent time at each station learning about each pump and what they had to offer.

“We had a score sheet that we set up with them, which is another important aspect to really make sure that objective data is collected to help drive the decisions that the diagnosis teams along with clinicians are making,” she said. 

Graham goes on to explain that the IV pumps were narrowed down to two choices and then those suppliers were brought back on campus where a deeper dive by staff can be done. “We worked on all these different clinical scenarios,” she commented, “that included a lot of different medications unique to their area.” 

She continued by saying that after getting that set of score sheets, it is nearing the time when the decision is brought to the executive level. “When we presented it back to the executive team, at that point, we obviously pulled in the financial piece of it as well too.
We had all the analytics around not only what the clinical information was as far as the front-line staff, but then also we had the financials that go along with it.”

Graham then said, “And then in our multi-disciplinary team, we had everyone—environmental services, infection control, clinical engineering, pharmacy, IT, physicians, anesthesia, pain team, as well as all of the different nurses and RT's. And we even brought in our transporters (they help transport the patients). We had the pumps on IV polls and they actually did a bit of a demo walking through the hospital with each of the different suppliers to see what it is like to get on the elevator, etc.”

She concluded, “So, we were really very methodical in making sure every aspect of how this pump project was, one, the best decision clinically, and secondly, for the money. This is a very expensive project that when you think about the volume of the pumps that we have to bring on board for the next 10 years, we need to make sure that the right decision for the organization, both clinically and finally, is made.”