A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX (Part 6)

Sramana: Where are you at in terms of scale?

Bruce Johnson: We handle over 52 billion dollars of healthcare supply chain orders annually. That is a significant portion of spend that we are automating.

Sramana: Are you a profitable company?

Bruce Johnson: Yes.

Sramana: Are your strategic partners your only investors or do you have institutional investors here as well?

Bruce Johnson: We have not taken any additional funding with any institutional investors. We have the original founders and the other partners who are part owners.

Sramana: Given the amount of data that you have in here, what data based products are you offering to your customers?

Bruce Johnson: We have a couple of things. First, one of the data tools that we have is a content management solution that allows a buyer to search very large sets of data. The searches are scoped for purchasing and the buyer can set up rules in that content management tool to ensure they are selecting items that they already have under contract which is advantageous for them under a cost perspective. It is also tied to the global industry database so the supplier can come into that. We have over 20,000 updates a day from the various data feeds that we take care of. That is part of what makes that such a valuable solution.

On the business information side we also have buyer and supplier intelligence tools which help with supply chain benchmarking. This would be things specific to how well they are doing in relation to their peers in productivity and utilization. That is not getting into pricing. It is getting into how fast they are driving productivity change within their organization.

Sramana: If I am a buyer and I want to find a new supplier, what facilities do I have to evaluate or choose suppliers based on my peer groups experience?

Bruce Johnson: That will be handled through the existing methods that a buyer would have. However, once they have selected a supplier and they have contracted with a supplier and they want to automate that process they have a tool called the Collaboration Portal which automates the information for that new contract. If a hospital had signed up with a new supplier that they have identified as having the right solution for their facility, they now can automate the process by which that data is going from that manufacturer to the wholesaler as well as the hospital. That is now automated and synchronized. They have a single location they can go for that.

This segment is part 6 in the series : A Successful Corporate Innovation Effort in HealthcareIT: Bruce Johnson, CEO of GHX
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