Healthcare Supply Chain Negotiations

NEGOTIATING SKILLS TRAINING

As a healthcare industry executive or senior executive who has decision-making authority, you are undoubtedly concerned about skyrocketing healthcare costs that put your institution’s operating budgets under scrutiny and extreme pressure. Whether you are operating in a private for-profit, private not-for-profit, government-funded, or a blended system, the many issues facing the industry are becoming increasingly complex.

Imagine the financial and non-financial benefits that could be achieved from having members of your organization become better negotiators – in almost any situation. Negotiating is an essential life skill. Members of your organization are negotiating all the time – with stakeholders, vendors, professional service firms, co-workers, colleagues, administration, government and community agencies, patients, patient advocacy groups, Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance companies, and charities.

Vendor sales organizations, sales agents, and medical distributors often receive extensive negotiating skills and sales training to protect their company’s high profit margins. Healthcare providers rarely invest in providing effective negotiating training. Being outmanoeuvred by more skilled negotiators means your institution is likely paying too much for goods and services, not extracting added value from vendors, and missing out on opportunities.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Do you know if your institution is overpaying for medical devices, implants, pharmaceuticals, capital equipment, specialized and general supplies, IT-related products, and food services?
Are medical industry sales representatives, sales agents, and distributors duly able to influence surgeons, physicians, and medical support staff?
Is your institution paying a “premium” price for non-differentiated, non-specialized products and services? Are your vendors exploiting these relationships?
Are your operating room theatres/suites and storage rooms full of excess vendor-managed inventory?
How efficient and effective are your institution’s sourcing, purchasing, and vendor management practices?
Does your institution utilize a simple, easy-to-use, and effective RFP/RFI/RFQ and bid/tender process and practices? Is your current purchasing process so cumbersome, complicated, and confusing that you are not optimizing lowest total acquisition costs? Are vendors not cooperating, complying, and conforming to your institution’s requirements and needs?
Are your operations and purchasing personnel so busy sourcing, troubleshooting, and dealing with internal challenges that they don’t negotiate effectively on a regular basis with vendors?
Is your institution too focused on price and not on overall value delivery from vendors? Do members of your organization know how to carefully determine, define, and extract incremental value from vendors?
Are your institution’s internal day-to-day negotiations with management, employees, and vendors being poorly managed? Is this resulting in less than ideal staff morale?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then just imagine the bottom-line operating dollars or value that your organization is leaving on the table. Think about what your institution could do with the potential thousands of dollars that could be saved through improving your organization’s negotiating process and outcomes.

Now is the time to invest in effective negotiating skills training and results-based consulting solutions from negotiatingcoach.com®. Members of your organization will learn how to save money and access untapped value from vendors across your entire supply chain to achieve better results.

Improved results can be achieved without compromising clinical outcomes, the quality of care, patient satisfaction, service levels, or your vendor relationships.

negotiatingcoach.com^® can help your institution save money and put the newly found financial savings to work on such things as capital equipment purchases; facility improvements and renovations; expansion projects; research initiatives; employee compensation programs; talent acquisitions; and improved patient care. In addition, consider the positive changes to the discussions held during government, board, and staff budget meetings.

negotiatingcoach.com’s specialized expertise can help healthcare organizations achieve between 7.5 percent and 33.7 percent in cost savings on non-labour expenses and costs. We can also negotiate price rollbacks, rebates, refunds, and performance-based incentives for your institution.

Don’t count on Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs), buying groups, or the purchasing power of your healthcare network to get your institution, hospital, extended care facility, nursing home, or clinic the best overall value from vendors. Expense-reduction consulting firms might help to identify and reduce some of the very basic healthcare-related costs and expenses; however, who is going to properly teach, train, and coach members of your organization to negotiate effectively on a day-to-day basis?

Our Secrets of Power Negotiating^® for Healthcare seminar or learning workshop is tailored to address the negotiating challenges faced by all supply chain and relevant cross-functional staff in healthcare.