23 September 2022 by Mat Oram
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and another three ICSs follow suit after agreeing to work with the award-winning healthcare technology supplier
The award-winning healthcare procurement technology company, AdviseInc, has won contracts with six integrated care system (ICS) in the East of England, in addition to Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and another three ICSs that have agreed to work with the company to achieve greater value for money from their procurement data. Following the flurry of contract wins, AdviseInc has worked with over 214 NHS organisations in the past few year across the United Kingdom.
Seven of the 11 new customers have opted to utilise AdviseInc’s Procurement Dashboard (PD) solution, which provides them with complete visibility of their spend data. Launched in 2017, the technology works by providing 100% visibility of non-pay spend across 100,000 suppliers and over 1.5 million products ensuring that procurement teams can identify saving opportunities and compare products across multiple suppliers.
The new PD customer sites are as follows:
In addition to the new PD customers, North West London ICS, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have deployed Procurement Dashboard Plus (PD+) – an extension of the PD package, providing users with further analytical support from AdviseInc’s team of experts. An agreement has also been reached with Cheshire and Merseyside ICS, where AdviseInc will deliver high-level analysis for identifying spend-saving opportunities across the region.
PD+ was launched in 2020 to support the transition to integrated care by offering extra support to procurement teams. This includes complete strategic analysis of core clinical areas, such as cardiology and trauma, as well as ad-hoc analysis as needed, monthly support management meetings, and the opportunity to input to the future development of the software.
Lee Jackson, Managing Director at North West London Procurement Services, said: “The level of analysis and insight that AdviseInc provides has allowed us to really drill down into our data, identify spend saving opportunities and deliver actionable insights for our procurement teams”
AdviseInc launched its analytics service in 2014, with the ambition to help NHS organisations understand spend data through a combination of analytics and delivery support. Since then, the company has developed a range of tools and services for procurement teams, including Price Benchmarking (PB), catalogue checking and the AdviseInc Index, a new solution most simply described as a price index for health.
AdviseInc identifies opportunities for NHS organisations to save between £250k and £5m a year, leading the company to earn recognition at a number of industry awards, including the British Data Awards where it was named ‘SME of The Year’, as well as the Health Tech Leaders Award where it was credited for its ‘Outstanding Supplier Contribution’. In January, AdviseInc was also listed as a ‘Healthcare Leader’ by the Financial Times for the third year in a row.
Rob Webb, Director of Procurement at ICS, Bath Swindon and Wiltshire ICS said: “We use the Procurement Dashboard to identify opportunities, to see if other trusts are getting a better price than us on certain items. We also use it for a lot of operational elements, for instance, looking at catalogue compliance and looking at where we can improve contractual coverage, so it’s not just on the savings element.
“It gives us a level of information we otherwise wouldn’t have; across our ICS, each of the three trusts use different finance and accounting systems, but we can put the data from each of them into the Procurement Dashboard and make comparisons, and look at the variance in prices between them. We’ve got high ambitions about what we want to do with our data, and AdviseInc is pivotal to that in terms of how to use it in the best way and present it in the best way, so that we can make informed decisions.”
Continuing to innovate and support its customers, AdviseInc has been developing a new platform, which will be rolled out by the end of the financial year. One of the solutions set to be embedded onto the new platform is Control Tower – AdviseInc’s latest innovation, purpose-built to help regional procurement teams simplify the vast amounts of information being collected and managed by teams in each care setting within an ICS, making insights easier to access and decipher.
Control Tower works by collecting, presenting and analysing information produced across a region, giving ICS procurement teams region-wide insight and helping them prioritise interventions to save money. It will be the first application to connect spend data, inventory data, catalogues and contract information. To date, two ICS have worked with AdviseInc on the development of Control Tower, with a further three due to go live with the solution once it is ready to launch.
Mat Oram, CEO and Co-Founder, AdviseInc, said: “As a team, we’ve invested significant time and resources into creating a procurement analytics service that provides users with complete oversight and meaningful value. We’re extremely happy to be extending our services across the NHS and working with new organisations. We understand how important procurement data is, and our solutions are helping provide NHS organisations with invaluable visibility and analysis, allowing teams to add value to their spend data and maximise value to the fullest.
“We pride ourselves on being more than just a product for procurement teams, but rather a service. The upcoming launch of the new AdviseInc Platform and Control Tower go further in providing NHS procurement teams with complete oversight, greater control over the data they see and drive actions in areas it is needed most.”
