Physician preference items can represent more than 50 percent of a surgery center's spend, according to Ann Castro, BroadJump's vice president of non-acute sales.
Ms. Castro shared the following tip regarding physician preference items with Becker's ASC Review:
"Physicians are trained to work with these specific items and don't want to 'move.' We've found price variances of up to 442 percent for PPIs, making this an extremely challenging area when it comes to controlling spend. Instead [of] taking on the difficult task of convincing physicians to switch products, ASCs should identify where there is variation and focus on how to fix it. An easy way to do this is by using comparative analytics tools to recognize these high-spend categories and use their positioning in the market to obtain a realistic price for what they should be paying for these products. Once you know where you stand against the market, you can use that information to level the playing field when negotiating with suppliers."