Innovation is the name of the game to stay competitive in the healthcare market. No matter your specific services, adapting to digital systems helps you provide better care for patients while keeping information safe.

How do you currently keep track of vendors? From suppliers to technicians to the cleaning crew, every healthcare business needs a vendor management system. However, the days of spreadsheets or handwritten invoices are over.

Excellent vendor management helps your healthcare business become more accurate, efficient, and cost-effective. Here’s how to improve your business growth with the right vendor management system.

What is Vendor Management?

Vendors come with a separate set of rules and organization than keeping track of your employees. Healthcare companies work with a variety of vendors, from supply vendors to hazardous waste disposal.

Outside vendors require scheduling, tracking, invoicing, and payment. Keeping track of documentation can get messy without a good system.

But wait, there’s more! Vendor management involves plenty of details for your healthcare business. You need someone who can manage each of these tasks for every vendor that helps keep your business running smoothly:

• Creating contracts or agreements
• Vendor sourcing, vetting, and contract negotiation
• Reporting and tracking metrics
• Monitoring compliance
• Risk mitigation
• Security
• Dispute resolution

If you’re still doing those tasks through a system of spreadsheets, you’re open to human error and overall inefficiencies.

Today’s healthcare businesses understand the importance of a digital vendor management system. Here’s how it can benefit you.

Reduce Risks

Every vendor who enters or exits your healthcare business is a security risk—even the cleaning crew. But security isn’t the only risk involved with managing multiple vendors.

The right vendor management system helps you reduce the potential for several kinds of risks to your business.

Income Risks

Choosing the wrong vendor can be an expensive mistake. You could overpay for services that could be more affordable from a different vendor. You could also be at risk for a vendor who isn’t dependable or doesn’t deliver the level of service you need.

Using a vendor management system helps you compare vendors, from pricing to performance. You can run reports to help you find cost savings or track late deliveries or patient complaints about a vendor.

Reputational Risk

Working with a vendor that has a poor reputation can damage your business’s reputation. Your vendor management system helps consolidate information about a vendor and categorize them for future reference—to use or not to use.

Compliance Risk

Healthcare is a highly-regulated industry, including HIPAA laws and data security measures. A spreadsheet system for your vendors can be a violation of current healthcare privacy laws and regulations for handling data.

A digital vendor governance system will follow current and changing healthcare data privacy laws.

Error Risk

Have you ever lost a spreadsheet on your computer when the power fails? Have you ever paid the wrong vendor or missed an invoice? Have you ever sent the wrong patient information to your imaging vendor?

Those can be dangerous and expensive mistakes. Using a vendor management system helps reduce the potential for technology failures or missed invoices.

Increase Efficiencies

Without a digital vendor management system, you increase your administrative overhead costs. Without a system, you probably have a full-time staff person handling all of your vendor details.

One of the best benefits of vendor management is watching how you become more efficient. When a consolidated vendor management system handles every aspect of invoicing, payment, scheduling, and saving documentation, you save time and money by improving the workload of your administrative staff.

Reducing human error, file duplication, and the time it takes to find that lost invoice helps keep your employees and your vendors happy.

Reduce Overages and Shortages

Did you place another bulk order for syringes even though someone ordered those on Monday? Are you overstocked on toilet paper for the restroom? Did you forget to order more gloves for your nurses?

Your vendor management system helps reduce the potential for overages, like placing too many orders for supplies. You’ll also never run out of your most-used supplies when your vendor management system alerts you to low supplies.

Improve Professionalism

The best vendors appreciate working with professional healthcare businesses. If you wonder why you have a hard time signing contracts or building relationships with the vendors you want, take a look at your vendor management system.

• Excellent vendors provide services on-time. They also want to receive payment on time. A digital vendor management system helps you offer excellent services to your vendors.
• Excellent services help you build relationships with the best vendors in your area. When you have the support you need from your vendors, you serve your patients or clients better.
• Excellent service helps build your reputation in your marketplace. A strong reputation helps you grow your healthcare business.

Operating as a well-oiled machine helps you appear more professional. Digital, consolidated vendor management services help you take your professional healthcare business to the next level.

Grow Your Business With Vendor Management

It can be easy to focus on patient care or the healthcare services you provide. Don’t forget to focus attention on the administrative part of your business. You probably have an excellent system to track patient information and health history.

Be sure your vendor management system is on par with how you handle patient management. Your patient care can suffer if you’re disorganized behind the scenes. If you can’t secure partnerships with the vendors who provide the best services, you’ll lose patients to other healthcare businesses in your field.

Your business (and your patients) are worth the effort to manage your vendors well! Did you find this information helpful? If so, be sure you check out our other articles under the Healthcare/IT section of our website!