24 April 2019 by Mat Oram
The latest version of AdviseInc’s Price Benchmarking solution launches across UK Healthcare providers
Hospitals paying different prices is an issue across healthcare. Neighbouring hospitals paying different prices for the same product from the same supplier. AdviseInc’s Price Benchmarking (PB) tool has for the last 3 years provided the first and only UK-wide view of product spend, providing full visibility across the health service for over 1.7m products and £12.5bn of spend. AdviseInc’s PB service is used by 90% of the UK with all spend across Wales and Northern Ireland in the tool and a growing number of providers across Scotland. 210 NHS Trusts use the service in England and it’s become a core tool for procurement teams and anyone involved in procurement.
Mat Oram, Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder of AdviseInc, explains how the platform developed: ‘Price Benchmarking was the first UK product pricing and comparison platform developed for the Health Service. Initially developed around the edges of the day job it quickly became a must-have tool for health procurement teams, especially in the NHS. Our original aim was to help NHS procurement teams, managers and clinicians to find the best prices for products for their patients without compromising their budgets. Procurement for a single hospital is a massive task on its own; the sheer number of items required makes in-depth, product-by-product comparison unfeasible for individual managers and teams without massive resource. Overspends were unavoidable because those who work within hospitals already have many demands on their time. Consequently, as a tool devised to tackle this issue, Price Benchmarking was adopted across the NHS within just a few months of its release, as praised by Lord Carter at a ⅓ of the cost of our competitors at the time. Returns on Investment of over 100:1 has been typical in large acutes and NHS Wales have saved over £1m already.’
Mark Roscrow MBE, Director of Procurement Services – NHS Wales said, ‘The Welsh Shared Service teams have embraced AdviseInc’s Price Benchmarking system and it’s now a vital tool in business as usual procurement across the whole of NHS Wales. We’ve even created an internal league table to see who can save the most money from the tool with prizes for the winners. This has got the team really engaged and driven some fantastic results. So far we’ve delivered over £1m of saving using the tool and we continue to identify more.’
Mat Oram goes on to say – ‘our original platform has been implemented by successive organisations, we’ve listened to user’s feedback and asked how we can make their lives easier. AdviseInc Price Benchmarking v3 starts to do some of that. By working ‘under-the-hood’ we’ve pulled out a lot more information from the data and able to benchmark more lines than ever’.
Simon Walsh, Group Procurement Director Manchester University NHS Foundation Trusts comments: ‘Price Benchmarking is now a core tool/service used in our procurement team across MFT. Decisions are now data led and the transparency both tools provide ensure we deliver value for money. We’ve already saved over £400k using PB alone (a significant ROI) and continue to work with colleagues across the trust, Greater Manchester and AdviseInc to further deliver better value for the NHS.’
Mat explains ‘Users already like our secure and simple to use upload facility, taking just seconds to upload files. We take all the work off the of the healthcare providers by extracting and transforming their data in days, not weeks or months. We have many trusts chasing us now at the start of the month to see last months data in the system and that’s great to see. Our mission remains the same. To help healthcare make sense of their spend data.’
On that note, we continue to invest & build on the only UK-wide health service product price benchmarking service. But we’re not stopping there… The next version is already in final build with more improvements to come and this summer healthcare will see the launch of the ‘next generation’ of Spend Analytics incorporating the latest in data analytics and visualisation from AdviseInc. We continue to join the best in technology, people, service and provide great value to our customers!’
