James Hull, VP of Operations for aptitude, shares insight into the new features that have been implemented this year and how they benefit healthcare providers and suppliers.

The aptitude product and technology teams have been working diligently all year to release enhancements both to the back end – which improves performance of the platform itself, and to the front end – which changes what customers see.  Both are critically important to ensure we are evolving to meet the needs of the industry, and that we are advancing our already first-in-class solution.

The team has made huge strides in developing the platform for both suppliers and providers – making it more flexible and informative than ever. Here are the three major projects that are successfully being completed this year.

1.      Flexible Supplier Tiers eliminate the traditional pricing structure and allow suppliers to customize their bids based on any of the following:

• Spend Market Share
• Unit Market Share
• Spend Volume
• Unit Volume

2.     CQVA – Value Analysis Resources provide an opportunity to align internal stakeholders, eliminate duplicative efforts, and leverage market data:

• Catalog of market crosses for all products in active categories
• Allows value analysis individuals within an organization to make decisions on crosses from a clinical perspective, and store all relative information about the decision in a central location where all users of aptitude within an organization can access it
• Allows providers to see crowd sourcing decisions from other clinicians on all market crosses

3.    Purchase Planning Experience has a new look and feel simplifying and enhancing options with:

• New Filters to allow sorting by Product Pricing Variance, Product Savings, Clinical Cross Selection, and the ability to hide columns
• Carve in Products allows our users to add products to an RFP that are outside the standard scope of the category
• Excluded Products allows our users to exclude spend from measurement if the product(s) are not on contract but fall within the standard scope of the category

Many of these updates are a direct result of requests from users – we greatly value your suggestions and recommendations.  At our annual user forum, access19, plus our strategic customer business reviews, we make an effort to seek out that information to ensure we are growing right along-side the industry’s leading providers and suppliers.