Speaker 1: Today on Conversations with Vi, Brian and I will be discussing the three major challenges hospitals are facing in achieving cost savings. The first one is obtaining, analyzing, and interpreting data. Brian, what are your thoughts on this challenge?

Speaker 2: For most of our clients, this is a huge issue, and the issue is mainly not that they don't know how to do these things, it's just that they don't have the bandwidth to actually devote resources to do them. So we have a team of analysts at Vi who are going to locate all the contracts, locate all the agreements, make sure everything's accounted for. We have technology that helps us extract large numbers of invoices, turn that into meaningful data, and then we can interpret it and help you draw conclusions so that we take this big pile of raw data and then hand back this finished product that's ready to start for your cost initiative.

Speaker 1: Great. Now, this goes right into the second major problem that we're seeing is competing priorities. What are your thoughts on competing priorities?

Speaker 2: This is probably one of the most important steps when you're coming up with a cost savings plan is how do you prioritize which initiatives go first. And it's really just where a combination of difficulty and the size of the opportunity. Obviously, for a very large opportunity, you can handle a large degree of difficulty. But for smaller cost savings opportunities, $10,000, $20,000 annually, you're not going to want to take those on first if there's a high degree of difficulty. So after we've analyzed and interpreted the data, then we can begin to use our expertise to prioritize all of your opportunities based on both complexity and size of the opportunity to determine which ones are appropriate to start first.

Speaker 1: Number three, stakeholder alignment. Talk a little bit about this for us, Brian.

Speaker 2: Stakeholder alignment offers a couple different challenges. When you're talking about large initiatives, such as a large PPI initiative, you have a large number of stakeholders that you need to engage. You have physicians you need to bring in C-level management. Now when you're talking about a medium to large size IT agreement, oftentimes they're doing it alone on an island, somebody in IT, and it's beneficial to be able to identify a higher stakeholder in the C-suite to come over and lend some authority to the negotiations and obtain the best pricing possible. So each different initiative is going to require different levels of stakeholder alignment, and it's important to identify and pull in the appropriate people as you're going through the initiatives and as you're negotiating with your vendors.

Speaker 1: If you're interested in additional resources and analytics behind your cost reduction initiatives, call us. We would love to support you and your team.