A closer look at the current situation

The current role of the hospital & healthcare procurement manager

• Purchasing medical goods does not enjoy a long tradition in hospitals or other healthcare providers. It was only with the emergence of the DRGs 10-15 years ago that purchasing started to become more important. Compared to other industrial sectors with as high a share of material costs as hospitals, this represents a backlog of some 20-25 years.
• For a long time, medical devices were by and large purchased on the side in hospitals and mainly by a pharmacist or financial controller. To this day, there is no training/education profile for buyers of medical devices/equipment.
• Even the centralisation of purchasing among hospital groups is a fairly recent development.
• Most procurement decisions on medical devices are being made based on price only, not on the outcome improvement delivered to the patient and other stakeholders.
• Doctors still dominate the scene because they think they know more about the products and believe themselves to be better purchasing managers.
• They have little understanding of how a modern purchasing department functions, i.e. the division of tasks between the technical requirements of the specifications and the subsequent professional procurement by the department.
• Doctors do not have a 360-degree view either. As well as the purely medical side to procurement, economic aspects need to be considered. A modern and up-to-date procurement approach does not just look at prices, but rather numerous other factors too: the keyword here is ‘value-based procurement’. It is only with a procurement approach like this that the financing of a modern healthcare system can continue.
• Doctors claim that medical products cannot be compared with other industrial goods because they “relate to human beings”.
• That is of course ludicrous. There are far more sensitive and riskier items to purchase than medical goods:
  – Almost every single aircraft component, from the thousands of small sensors and the plane’s tires to the associated software for controlling the aircraft, is extremely important when it comes to safety.
  • Brake discs still need to work and deliver maximum performance when in a  glowing state
  • The same applies to nuclear power plants, cableways, and shipping, etc.
  • … the list goes on
• When you think of “your colleagues” from the above-mentioned fields, a hip stem or cardiac pacemaker makes for a comparably easy life.

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