One thought: the Search for Supply Chain Excellence in Healthcare Awards program, as it always does, culminated in a single winner in Sisters of Mercy Health System, but after hearing the award nomination presentations by all five finalists, I realized we truly did have five winners.

Mercy’s supply chain arm, ROi, won the Summit of Excellence Award for its innovative project centered on custom packs for surgeries and other procedures. But we also honored with Peer Choice awards Huntsville (Ala.) Hospital, which replaced its aging inventory of more than 750 hospital beds through a partnership with a vendor instead of using a group purchasing organization contract; Johns Hopkins Health System, Baltimore, which adopted an electronic bidding system to increase competition and drive down supply costs; St. Anthony’s Medical Center, St. Louis, which adopted a holistic supply chain process that included a new panel to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of purchased products and services; and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which used its formerly independent catering operation as a test case for electronic procurement technology.

The systems involved in these projects are the best in class, their work a tribute to the spirit of excellence. We can only hope that next year’s awards nominations come close to this level of innovation.

I have special thanks for all of the speakers and panelists, who made the Spring Summit one to remember. I hope everyone enjoyed the fruits of the new partnership with Disney Institute. We hope to recreate that magic in the future.

We’ve had a lot of interest in the video of the healthcare reform panel and I’d like to salute the participants on this panel. Mark McKenna, former president and CEO of Novation, moderated a panel that included Rand Ballard, chairman of the Health Industry Group Purchasing Association and senior executive vice president and COO of MedAssets; Frank Cirillo, senior VP and chief restructuring officer of NYC Health & Hospitals Corp.; and Vance Moore, president and CEO of ROi. They provided attendees with a thoughtful and interesting dialogue on how reform will impact the supply chain. (To watch the session, click here.)

McKenna filled in for Chuck Lauer, our esteemed colleague who has been out of action after surgery earlier this spring. We look forward to Chuck being back in the flow at our Fall 2010 IDN Summit and Expo.

And continuing that thought, the theme this fall will be ‘Healthcare at a Crossroads’.  As the health reform regulations start to flow from Washington, and other changes impact the delivery of healthcare, there will be plenty to talk about when we gather Sept. 21-Sept. 23 at the Arizona Grand Resort in Phoenix. We will have a tentative agenda to share with you in the coming weeks.

Finally, to all 589 attendees in Orlando (20% increase from 2009 Spring Summit), our profound thanks for coming and for being so willing to share your thoughts at the Peer-to-Peer Exchanges. If you haven’t done so already, we would also like your parting thoughts. Please click here for the survey information we sent out last week. Getting input from participants on our events is vitally important to us and helps inform and inspire us to do even better next time.

Similarly, the five finalists you supported are truly indicative of the range of innovation going on across the country. I hope that healthcare policy experts—especially those looking at how to control costs—read these submissions and understand that forward-looking supply chain departments hold the promise of reducing costs and improving quality of care. I think this is a missed opportunity in the reform proposals I have seen.

If those folks did read these submissions, here is what they would find:

• Huntsville Hospital saved millions with a vendor partnership to replace aging medical beds. The novel deal also involves other benefits, including help with a patient fall reduction campaign. Read Huntsville’s full submission.

• Johns Hopkins uses electronic bidding on all supply contracts to overcome inertia in contracting. Like many large organizations, the staff there fell into the rut of simply renegotiating contracts with the same vendors, not having the weeks of effort needed to the contracting departments. After a test, Johns Hopkins now uses e-bidding for much of its supply spend. This is a good system for everyone, as vendors can bid without time-consuming site visits and find out if they got the job in a matter of hours. Read the  submission.

• St. Anthony’s Medical Center moved from a materials management mindset to a true supply chain approach. Its account of that transformation should be required reading for any organization mired in the old ways of doing business. Read the full submission.

• ROi, the Sisters of Mercy Health System’s supply chain arm, built a custom procedure tray manufacturing facility from scratch. It decided to go the whole way, becoming an FDA-approved facility. With the use of procedure packs rising exponentially, the Sisters of Mercy project seems particularly prescient. Read the full submission.

• Finally, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center tested e-sourcing in its catering operation, saving 400% on costs. It sees this cutting-edge initiative as a model for future contracting. Read the entire submission.

Attendees at the Spring IDN Summit and Expo in Orlando next month will be able to hear presentations from the finalists prior to voting for the The Search for Supply Chain Excellence in Healthcare Awards. We think it will be an inspiring time for anyone looking for models for improving their supply chain operations.

We look forward to that, and to seeing everyone there.

With less than two months until the spring Summit in Orlando, we are busy finalizing our roster of top-notch speakers, and I can tell you it is already shaping up as impressive a group as we have had. My hat is once again off to the Education Advisory Board  who provided much needed guidance in speaker selection and program development.

Here are the first three examples to illustrate that point. I’ll be updating a summary of each session education leaders over the next few months so check back for updates:

• Desi Kotis,  the pharmacy director at Northwestern Memorial Hospital  in Chicago, will be on hand to present on medicine reconciliation. In 2006, Northwestern received a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to address this pivotal patient safety issue. Kotis has led a multidisciplinary team, supported by hospital leadership, which created the Medications at Transitions and Clinical Handoffs initiative to weave medication reconciliation into all points of patient care.

• Dan Maloy, the founder of the Maloy Group, will present on “Benchmarking Sales Channel Strategies,” and will moderate our Peer-to-Peer Exchange  on physician preference items. Dan will provide information for organizations to benchmark their sales strategies against other companies across the healthcare industry, and is based on the results of a landmark research study of national and corporate account channel strategies. Dan’s experience spans the supplier and distributor sides of healthcare. He has held numerous leadership positions in marketing, sales and business development, and throughout his career he has consistently delivered results for large organizations such as Johnson & Johnson Medical, McKesson Medical-Surgical and Owens & Minor. Dan has also served in leadership roles on several key industry boards and is an adjunct faculty member in the Marketing, Industrial Distribution and Economics Department at the University of Alabama Birmingham.

Also featured in the new Market Intelligence Track , is Mike Langlois,  who currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Daudlin, DeBeaupre and Company and most of you know from running Ascension Health’s supply chain for many years. Mike will lead you through the analysis of the results from the recent research we conducted of healthcare supply chain leaders. Mike will enhance this session by discussing other research he’s compiled from additional sources. Mike has an enormous breadth of knowledge and his insights will assist all of us in a deeper understanding of the healthcare supply chain. 

I wanted to take this opportunity to remind readers that the initial round of voting for the 2010 Search for Supply Chain Excellence in Healthcare Awards will end this Sunday, Feb. 28. Senior executives of healthcare provider organizations are eligible to vote. To vote go here.

The top five vote-getting submissions will be announced March 8, and the finalists will be invited to make presentations at the Spring IDN Summit and Expo. Final voting for the awards will occur during a general session at the summit. At that time, a single Summit of Excellence Award Winner will be chosen, along with four Peer Choice Award honorees.

This is the only independent awards program for supply chain excellence, so if you haven’t already, please make sure you cast your vote!

When my company took over this event a little more than a year and a half ago, we had a goal of building on what was already a unique conference. The reverse expo, a great idea in concept and execution, was already in place. We wanted to add to that a different kind of program. There are a lot of meetings in the supply chain space, but we believed that by focusing on innovative educational content and interactivity, we could spark some magic. Each Summit and Expo could be bigger than the sum of its parts, giving attendees the information and inspiration they need to help their organizations deliver on the promise of higher-quality, more cost-efficient care.

We continue to build on that concept. For Orlando, we have created a new Market Intelligence Track, where sessions will focus on a range of cutting-edge research on aspects of the healthcare supply chain. In these sessions we’ll work on analyzing key research impacting the healthcare supply chain. As we move forward, we’d like for each new IDN Summit and Expo to feature the results of our latest research as well as other market research. For more details check out these sessions HERE

I mentioned interactivity. We introduced a Peer-to-Peer Exchange (P2P) at last fall’s Summit and we’ll continue this concept with the Peer-to-Peer Exchange Breakfasts allowing attendees to review in-depth four key challenges in supply chain management and through moderated dialogues arrive at some new ideas and solutions to those challenges. At the spring event, the topics will be physician preference items, communicating with leadership, vendor credentialing and data standardization.

In Orlando, we’re going to introduce attendees to the concept of Positive Deviance (PD). For those who don’t know exactly what PD is all about, we’ll discuss the adaptation of this concept to healthcare, where it is being used with great success to solve a range of seemingly intractable problems, such as healthcare-acquired infections. The approach enables organizations to mine the uncommon, but successful habits of its best people and spread those habits across the enterprise.

We’re also going to provide attendees with the benefits of our partnership with Disney Institute. Talk about magic: Institute experts will be on hand to explain the Disney Difference in Value Chain Management. They will discuss how integrating four components—planning, processes, partnering and performance—can help healthcare organizations  manage resources, streamline processes and reduce waste to add money to the bottom line without raising prices or passing costs on to customers. For more information about the IDN Summit partnership with Disney Institute go HERE   

We also have worked to make our meetings timely, and so, with health reform still a possibility, we have put together a high-impact panel discussion on reform and future trends led by Chuck Lauer, healthcare visionary and former publisher of Modern Healthcare magazine. The panel includes John Hillenmeyer, CEO, Orlando Health; Michael Israel, CEO, Westchester Medical Center; Ed Lovern, Executive Vice President of Piedmont Healthcare; and Joseph Swedish, CEO, Trinity Health. Here’s the page for more information concerning the General Sessions: GENERAL SESSIONS

There’s a lot more to our Orlando meeting, which you can read more about HERE

We believe this meeting is your meeting so let us know what you think of the agenda and if you would like to participate for the Fall IDN Summit send Lisa Ponssa an email and she’ll discuss the opportunities with you, her email address is lisa@idnsummit.com

Rest assured, we will continue to build on our commitment to making the IDN Summit and Expo a unique event in the annual healthcare supply chain conference landscape.

One thing is certain though, and that is that the Federation of American Hospitals will take Washington by storm (let’s hope it’s not another snowstorm) from Feb. 28 to March 3. When we first started surveying healthcare supply chain executives in 2008, the federation’s annual Public Policy Conference and Business Exposition stood out as a can’t-miss event. I came to understand that one of the biggest reasons for that was the outstanding work that the federation’s senior VP for administrative services, Bonnie Moneypenny, and her staff do to coordinate the expo.

I got to know Bonnie and Marci Freeman (director of administrative services) one very snowy, icy day in Little Rock, Ark., over lunch last January and have so enjoyed working with them. Anyone working in the for-profit hospital space should go to the federation meeting. Check out the Web site for more information. And when you get to Washington, make sure you say hello to those fabulous women who make the federation expo such a valuable event.

Other developments in 2010 may not be as clear as the decision to attend the federation confab.

There are numerous 2010 planning outlooks available but one I find interesting is PricewaterhouseCoopers’ new (and aptly titled) report, “Top 10 Health Industry Issues: Squeezing the Juice out of Healthcare.” The report offers a lot of helpful tips, including those for handling the coming tide of new regulations from healthcare reform.  

I have been following Bob Ferrari’s Supply Chain Matters blog, and he has five interesting predictions for 2010 for the global supply chain. His most recent post will take you back to his previous predictions. The new entry has predictions focusing on carbon tracking and sustainability. In a bit of research among senior healthcare supply chain executives that we’re going to be releasing in the next couple of weeks, it appears that sustainability is not as high a priority for these executives as current opinion may suggest. We found that only five percent of the executives’ surveyed suggested sustainability was an immediate or long-term concern. This tracks with the findings of research we’ve previously done on requested topic areas for the IDN Summits.

For those of you needing assistance with New Year’s resolutions, let me suggest Pat Wardwell’s “Lean Resolutions.” Pat is COO of the Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership, and his resolutions appear in the wonderful “Running a Hospital” blog of Paul Levy, the president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. A simple resolution that caught my eye: “Ask five different people who work for you ‘what can be improved’ at least once a week.”

There is one person who for years has helped healthcare executives make sense out of a complicated world, and that is Chuck Lauer. We’re excited to announce we’ll be working with Chuck on an even more in-depth basis this year. Chuck will be providing us with his “Insights” column on a biweekly basis. We are so appreciative to have his guidance as we move forward in 2010. Chuck will also be leading his very popular CEO Discussions at both of the IDN Summits this year. (The Spring Summit is April 20-22 in Orlando, Fla., and the Fall Summit is Sept. 21-23 in Phoenix.)

While there are numerous blogs and commentary available to you, I hope to use this space to offer readers the insights that IDN Summit and Healthcare Business Media can provide concerning the healthcare supply chain space. If you’ve got something to share, please post a comment below to continue this discussion.