Healthcare Organizations Rely On SciQuest To Optimize Supply Chains And Generate Savings

SciQuest's Customers Drive Bottom Line Results by Bringing Previously Unmanaged Areas of Spending Under Control for the First Time

CARY, NC /PRNewswire/ -- SciQuest, Inc., today announced that customers including AmSurg, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the University of Connecticut Health Center are among the many well-known organizations that are radically reducing costs and improving efficiency by bringing unmanaged spending in their supply chains under control. In a time when healthcare organizations have pledged $2 trillion in savings over the next 10 years, SciQuest's strategic procurement solutions are critical to helping organizations achieve new efficiencies while saving money and still delivering exceptional patient care.

With the Association for Healthcare Resource and Materials Management's (AHRMM) finding that every dollar saved in expenses at the nation's hospitals equates to $50 in gross revenue and a recent Thomson Reuters report(1) concluding that approximately 50 percent of hospitals operate in the red, optimization of the healthcare supply chain is crucial. Eprocurement systems and the strategic sourcing techniques they empower provide organizations with an efficient and effective way to reduce their overall supply expense, often between five and 20 percent. And the savings on some items are far higher.

"A comprehensive approach to supply chain management and procurement is a very important competency for healthcare organizations. The economic downturn has emphasized the need for organizations to delve deeper and leverage new techniques like eprocurement to gain efficiencies and take timely advantage of savings opportunities," said Vi Shaffer, research director at Gartner.

Specifically, SciQuest's customers are using the company's on-demand procurement automation and supplier management technologies to gain control over purchases that are unmanaged in most healthcare systems. These purchases are typically made at retail or non-contracted prices, and often include non-stocked items that do not reside in the item master systems used within most hospitals. These include categories that have complex, dynamic supplier catalogs, which are often also high-cost supplies.

Although lower in volume than traditional managed transactions, these unmanaged purchases amount to millions of dollars annually for most healthcare organizations, in some cases comprising as much as 70 percent of a provider's spending on supplies each year. In some organizations, SciQuest is used to aggregate the buying power of numerous locations to drive volume discounts on all purchases and generate efficiencies of scale.

"Many areas of the healthcare supply chain are highly refined and cost effective, but unmanaged spending and purchasing behavior has always been the industry's version of the 'wild west,'" said Stephen Wiehe, president and CEO of SciQuest. "Our customers are innovating new ways to bring this problem under control, using SciQuest solutions to gain unprecedented visibility and control over previously unmanaged spending practices. This delivers enormous cost savings to healthcare organizations without impacting patient care - because they are purchasing the same items they were before. They are simply purchasing them for substantially less money."

SciQuest Addresses the Procurement Needs of the Clinical Environment

SciQuest directly addresses the procurement needs of hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers and other clinical environments. Features and functionality within the SciQuest solution suite include:

• A flexible approach: SciQuest's modular on-demand eprocurement and supplier management solutions can be deployed within existing systems as needed or as a complete procure-to-pay solution -- without taxing internal IT resources.
• Greater transparency: SciQuest gives financial leaders visibility into all purchases made through the system, such as those for non-stocked items, and provides the deep reporting capabilities needed to make strategic sourcing decisions, identify purchasing trends and put contracts in place with preferred suppliers.
• An intuitive Web-based platform: SciQuest provides users with a familiar buying experience similar to that enjoyed by consumers on popular e-commerce sites and automates purchasing workflow -- freeing procurement staff to take part in high value activities while increasing user adoption.
• Integration with existing investments: SciQuest integrates with common hospital materials management systems, such as those offered by Lawson Software, McKesson and Oracle.

About SciQuest
SciQuest's procurement automation and supplier enablement solutions empower leading organizations to realize the potential of strategic procurement. The company's specialized knowledge, on-demand software, and service-first approach enable public and private enterprises across the globe to manage spend, drive ROI, and advance their critical missions.

SciQuest's deep understanding of its served vertical markets combined with a broad supplier network and intuitive, online shopping experience increase user and contract adoption while improving operational efficiencies. Through software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment, organizations can quickly implement the right eprocurement solution to augment existing ERP investments or fully enable all aspects of purchasing from sourcing to settlement.

For more information about SciQuest, please visit www.sciQuest.com or call 877-710-0413 in the U.S. or +44 1794 341182 in Europe.

SciQuest is a registered trademark of SciQuest, Inc. Other trademarks contained herein remain the property of their respective owners.

(1) Dunn, Dennis, PhD.; Koepke, David, PhD; and Pickens, Gary, PhD. (March 2009). The Current Recession in U.S. Hospitals. Thomson Reuters Center for Healthcare Improvement.

SOURCE SciQuest, Inc.