McKesson Offers the First Cloud-Based Supply Chain Solution that Yields a New Level of Customer Benefits

ATLANTA --(BUSINESS WIRE)-- McKesson today announced a fully-integrated, cloud-based sourcing solution designed to completely automate the healthcare supply chain. McKesson Strategic Supply Sourcing™ will give providers unprecedented visibility and control over their medical-surgical supply spending. The solution is the first offering on the market that can support multiple materials management information systems (MMIS) and combine external and internal data for a single, comprehensive view of an organization’s supply chain spend.

Users of the new solution will have access to information on critical medical-surgical supplies, high-cost physician preference items, and group purchasing organization or self-contracted items through a private marketplace. Normalization of spending data will help support providers’ value analysis projects and ensure that they are purchasing the right products at the right price.

“According to a recent article by Materials Management in Healthcare,1 supply chain costs consume as much as 40% of total operating budget, the second-largest expense for hospitals after labor,” said Chris Bauleke, president, Health Systems Performance Management, McKesson Provider Technologies. “As a result, effective supply chain management is a critical element of strategic financial planning for hospitals. Automating the purchasing process should help to improve contract compliance and reduce unnecessary spending.”

According to the March 2011 Strategic Sourcing whitepaper released by the Aberdeen Group, traditional tracking systems often miss as much as 60% of an organization’s medical-surgical supply item spend,2 which results in providers paying different prices for supplies and maintaining multiple contracts for the same items across their organizations. With McKesson’s sourcing solution, users can effectively leverage each organization’s purchases and negotiate more favorable contracts.

Using artificial intelligence built into the new sourcing solution, providers can create and view a virtually unlimited set of parameters and naming conventions to achieve a detailed understanding of all purchases. By aggregating the data, the solution can enable providers to find and eliminate duplicate contracts and create functionally equivalent product identifiers to consolidate purchases. The expected result is greater efficiency and savings in both time and money. In addition, McKesson offers on-site and remote consultants to advise organizations on how to maximize their savings.

“McKesson Strategic Supply Sourcing is part of our comprehensive approach to resource management,” added Bauleke. “Hospitals continue to face increasing financial pressures. Our new solution will provide them with the tools they need to understand and effectively manage the supply chain and realize significant and long-lasting financial improvements.”

About McKesson

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 15th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to making the business of healthcare run better. We partner with payers, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and others across the spectrum of care to build healthier organizations that deliver better care to patients in every setting. McKesson helps its customers improve their financial, operational, and clinical performance with solutions that include pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management, healthcare information technology, and business and clinical services. For more information, visit http://www.mckesson.com.