How to collaborate and work with physicians and internal teams on physician preference initiatives. Episode Introduction Physician preference items, or physician-driven spend, is a significant driver of costs for a hospital. So if you want to optimize the hospital’s spend, you have to go directly to the source: physicians. The best way to increase your operating margins is by collaborating with the physicians to help them get what they need at the best price possible. Show Topics How to get support for your planShow them the comparative marketOffer the right informationGo beyond benchmarkingListen to the physicians Collaborate to gain confidenceSwitch up your strategyHelp negotiations run smoothlyKeep an eye on the detailsDeal with new products 2:32 – How to get support for your plan Bryan said if you want to drive engagement in physician preference item initiatives, you must analyze the data, engage with the physician, and establish credibility with them. “You need to have a clear picture of what's being used, what you're purchasing, how they're being used in the case. This could be time-consuming and slow the analysis down. I think this is the first area where working with a consultant who works in these initiatives frequently can really help speed this up, get an accurate analysis, and get your project going faster. The next area that's really important is physician engagement, and these all tie together because the data analysis is going to lead into the physician engagement. You need to establish credibility with accurate analysis and insight, provide clear data that's concise, and make sense to the physician. And then using both of those, the data analysis and the feedback from the physicians, to come up with a uniform strategy for engaging your vendor. You need to bring all this together so that you have support, not just from the physicians, but from C-suite and supply chain so that it's a uniform strategy that you're coming to the vendors with and everybody's engaged.” 6:08 – Show them the comparative market Bryan said instead of focusing on benchmarking, you have to compare pricing with the comparative market. “That’s how the physicians are looking at it. They don't understand that buying this skew with this femur, they understand this is the contract. This is the knee I’m buying. This is what it looks like. And when you pull that apart and look at it that way, you start to get other insights. You can have a great price on revisions, but when you start using those revision tibias in the primary cases, you could be adding $1,000 to $2,000 to your primary cases. And that's a much better discussion to have with physicians rather than benchmarking. They do want to see benchmarking and they want to see how they compare to the market, but they want to see that from the perspective of the constructs they're using. How does my case cost compare to the market? How does my case cost or my construct cost compare to the other physicians who are using different vendors at the same organization? And then what's my profitability look like on these cases? That's what they're interested in.” 8:13 – Offer the right information Bryan said if you want to gain credibility with physicians, you have to give them clear and concise information. “When you go into these meetings with the physicians to get support on your cost savings initiatives, you have to have your information properly put into a deck so they can understand it, so that they can support it. And bringing them insights so you can gain credibility. We were working with a client who had really excellent total knee and total hip pricing, and we were working on that engagement with the orthopedic surgeon. And even though the benchmarking data said they have very good pricing, when we dove into what they're actually using in the cases we found that the whole contract was negotiated with the assumption that they'd be using the patella in every total knee case. And this surgeon was never using a patella. So even though the benchmarking said they had excellent pricing, we were able to take that cost of the patella out of that construct cost, and then give them a pretty good reduction on these whole knees. That was a strategy that the physician had no awareness of how that contract is put together, what they're being charged, that he could get behind because it made sense.” 10:12 – Go beyond benchmarking Lisa said instead of relying on benchmarking, you have to look at the real-life use of products to build trust with physicians. “Of course benchmarking is important, but there's so much more to benchmarking. It really is this thinking, and you always say it, ‘Where's the money in this?’ Thinking about it differently. Typically there is cost takeout, or what's this contract about? And you're always about putting the pieces together, and I think that that's a big differentiator. Just line item, just ...
