DoD and VA to Reduce Healthcare Supply C...( FORT BELVOIR Va. Oct. 22 -- With...),Health

FORT BELVOIR, Va., Oct. 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- With health facilities across the country struggling to make ends meet, the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs (VA) are demonstrating leadership by collaborating in efforts to reduce unnecessary costs and improve operations in the federal healthcare supply chain. Through the innovative joint incentive funding, the DoD and VA are linking and expanding their ongoing initiatives to both standardize and synchronize product information between their hospitals and supplier partners.

The DoD and VA joint incentive funding program is important because it takes aim at a significant problem in healthcare -- inconsistent and inaccurate product information. Bad data contributes to the inefficient exchange of information in the supply chain, adding costs to an already burdened industry and potentially impacting patient safety.

"Our ongoing effort to reduce costs through synchronized data holds promise for the entire industry. While we are seeing exciting results, our work really serves as an interim step that will help us drive efficiencies internally until a larger, industry-wide solution becomes a single, updated source for standardized and synchronized medical and surgical product information," says Kathleen Garvin, program manager for DoD/VA Data Synchronization. "Such an industry product data utility has the potential to bring the same level of efficiencies to the healthcare supply chain that data synchronization has brought to many other multi-billion dollar industries, including the grocery and retail industries."

To support the data synchronization program, the DoD is successfully synchronizing data housed in the materials information systems of 35 military hospitals with product data from more than 20 supplier partners and two major distributors. As of Sept. 15, 2007, the DoD has documented $16.5 million in product price reductions, and moved $6.7 million in 1,041 purchase order l
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