With over 20 years of clinical and process improvement experience, Michelle Gluege is leveraging her skills for the benefit of our customers.

From the Cardiac Cath Lab to a Director of Supply Chain, Michelle has been on many sides of the table over her extensive career. She has worked with providers around the country as a consultant to help advance their procurement and contracting strategies and has the clinical experience to back up the business decisions required to ensure both cost and quality requirements are being achieved.

Since joining team aptitude, Michelle is already proving to be a collaborative, strategic asset.

Michelle serves as a dedicated resource to a large provider group sourcing department, training team members on the platform and helping to accelerate their initiatives while maximizing the value achieved on each new contract.

“As with many healthcare organizations, we have found that it’s a challenge to act on all of the opportunities available due to constrained resources. That’s where I see aptitude being able to deliver the most value to customers – by streamlining many of the time-consuming processes, we can help improve speed to execution and serve as an additional source of experience to find the best path to value.”

This has proven to be especially helpful in categories where quality or availability has become an issue – the market insight and detailed cross references allow a provider’s clinical team to easily identify equivalent products and source them efficiently – enhancing the total cost of care and avoiding any negative impact on quality of care.

Working collaboratively with the team she is documenting roadmaps that expedite initiatives and create a consistent approach to the business. With a focus on process improvement, specific to the needs of the organization, Michelle can ensure aptitude is helping customers optimize their supply chain.

One of the biggest challenges Michelle has observed over the course of her career is the need for supply chain to secure the support of executive leadership so that they have access to the resources needed. Additionally, finding the right talent to add to the team can be a challenge if there is a smaller pool of applicants to select from when growing their organization. This is another space where aptitude can help – with a platform that streamlines analytics, and a market executive to help execute, organizations can do more with fewer resources. It relieves much of the manual work done traditionally by a supply chain analyst including calculating market share for comparison and the analytics that go into creating and executing an RFP.

Michelle is also using her industry experience to help customers be more aggressive in running their initiatives by leveraging strategies that she has successfully used with other providers. Using a combination of creative contracting and strategically approaching the business, providers can achieve higher levels of cost savings while creating partnerships with key suppliers.

“Over the course of my career I have learned that suppliers aren’t the enemy. It’s important to create and build relationships. To do what’s best for the member and the patient, but also for the supplier. We all need each other to advance and sustain the industry as a whole.”