CASE STUDY
Savings Made Simple
The team at Mary Washington Healthcare established a big savings goal – and aptitude helped them reach it. With declining revenue streams, it’s mandatory for health care organizations to look for multiple ways to offset losses. The leaders at Mary Washington Healthcare gave their team a big challenge: remove $30 million from the operating budget for 2015. Of that number, $8.2 million was non-labor expenses. Alan Edwards, vice president of supply chain solutions, immediately went to work. “We identified about $12 million in savings opportunities through hundreds of individual ideas,” Edward said. “We had to quickly examine the opportunities to see what was real – separating the pretenders from the contenders, so to speak.” The organization had implemented aptitude the year before, but hadn’t fully embraced its potential. Edwards felt it was time to take another look at the tool. “It was one of those ‘a-ha’ moments for me when I realized that we had 400 ideas we had to vet, and aptitude has a dashboard where we could quickly visualize what the data was telling us. We didn’t have to go into Sherlock Holmes mode and call in all the data. With aptitude, the work was already done.”
“In today’s healthcare environment, where both the suppliers and the providers are being impacted, we need to do everything possible to leverage business opportunities and reduce or eliminate manual procedures."