Overcoming challenges in Healthcare Services: A comprehensive video series

We are in the midst of some of the most turbulent market conditions in recent years and the healthcare sector has been disrupted by various cost pressures.  We’re all aware of massive price inflation, supply risks as well as of course the staggering labour shortages in the market.

In particular from a provider perspective, we’ve also seen an ongoing consolidation within the market. The healthcare provider sector was previously made up of smaller clinics. As a result it has been typically characterised by both spend fragmentation & limited transparency. In turn this has meant that clinics have limited capabilities to influence their spend. As a result, we have seen an increase in M&A activities in recent years, but the newly formed groups still struggle to manage their spend.

It’s in the context of these market conditions, that as part of a wider procurement transformation project, we set out to support our client – a Healthcare provider – who was facing some of these challenges. We were tasked with finding a solution for their support services to improve service quality whilst delivering savings in a challenging market environment. But before we delve deeper into this, let’s take a moment to review these market challenges in a bit more detail.

Firstly, price inflation has a wide-ranging impact on both products and wage pressures. Secondly, supply risks – such as Covid-19 & the war in Ukraine – have disrupted the supply of products. However, the biggest problem has been labour shortages which have impacted healthcare providers in several European countries.

To overcome these, we considered three main alternatives for our client:

The first option on our list is that firms can renegotiate the terms of procurement for products & services. Whilst this may improve costs over the short term, it leaves long term structural problems neglected. Problems like labour shortages for instance.

Option 2 looks at redesigning the services. A service redesign can enable healthcare providers to pivot to long-term trends but may be an inadequate solution in the short term. A service redesign takes time to bed in and won’t solve immediate problems like inflation.

The final option on our list has just the right balance. It balances the concerns of the other alternatives and it’s the one we’re here to focus on today – Outsourcing.

We from Inverto can support the complex needs of first-generation outsourcing in healthcare. With our diverse and cross-functional background, built over the last 20 years and the expertise of our procurement experts, we can leverage our knowhow in delivering similar services outsourcing projects to apply best practice from extensive previous experience.

As a trusted partner, Inverto can help guide you throughout the process. We can help you to understand the true scale of your costs and support you through the mechanics of building the right approach to outsourcing. Depending on your preferences, we can lead the search for suitable partners or provide you with the tools and support to step into that role yourself.

For our client, on a day-to-day level, Inverto ran that search from setting up the tenders through to negotiating the best prices by applying our diverse internal benchmarks. The team visited all the locations to be outsourced and we leveraged our procurement toolkit to unlock at the end of the day, the value promised on the drawing board.

An experienced facilitator like Inverto can take the weight off your shoulders by ensuring that critical requirements are identified, captured & managed at the start from diverse key stakeholder groups. Inverto can work with groups as varied as healthcare specialists, site & regional directors and patient focus groups whilst ensuring that national and regional health standards are aligned and met.

Above all, it goes without saying that only a managed and united team will succeed in delivering Outsourcing.