When you Google “data in healthcare” the search returns 834,000,000 results – at least that’s what it said last week.  Everyone wants to understand how their organization is performing and what their customers are doing.   Data, as indicated by the Google results, has become big business as a result.

There is a consistent flow of new products, companies and analytics platforms that are carving up data to help businesses gain insight into opportunity and performance.   All in an attempt to make things clearer – more simplistic.

But with so many individual approaches and origins of information the opposite tends to occur. It’s becoming harder to establish a consistent, reliable source of truth.  It’s a challenge across healthcare, and particularly prevalent in the supply chain.

We work with providers, who have their own purchasing data. We talk to suppliers, who rely on their field team and sales reports to garner performance.  But we found that the two rarely aligned.

You’ve heard us before, we place a significant emphasis on our data.  How it’s collected, identified, categorized and shared through out the experience.   And while that’s important and valuable, it’s hard for us to claim that alone makes us unique.   What customers tell us makes the true difference, is in the access – how the data is accessed, when the data is accessed and finally – who has access.

So we established a solution that both parties could leverage collaboratively – a shared resource for understanding their business relationship.   Through our online platform, each side sees identical output, which originates from the same place and is available to both – at the same time.

Helping customers get the who, when and how all on the same page.

Early on in the process, we also discovered that the ability to manage agreements after they were executed was a need in our industry.   Many valuable resources and extensive effort went into finalizing the agreement but having access to reliable data afterwards – to manage and monitor performance – was a continued challenge for most healthcare organizations.

As a result, we introduced a data-driven mechanism for both parties to stay engaged and optimize their business throughout the life-cycle of the contract.   This is facilitated by everyone seeing the same, consistent information: monthly market share, facility utilization details and subcategory performance can be the foundation of discussions that advance strategic partnerships.

Circling back to our data – we do believe that our detailed approach to cleansing, our clinically-reviewed categorization, and our consistent, timely updates make it a best-in-class resource for the healthcare supply chain.  But great data alone is not enough.

It’s the access model – easy access, consistent access, shared access – that’s making a positive impact for our customers. A single source of truth, for the life of the agreement, enables greater value for both suppliers and providers.  And that’s something everyone can agree on.

Justin Hibbs, VP of Business Development and Strategy for aptitude