In an effort to find ways to reduce spending on health care while maintaining coverage for veterans, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs recently joined a research consortium put together by ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business.
The Carey School hosts the Health Sector Supply Chain Research Consortium, which consists of various leaders in the health field who work with researchers, most of whom are ASU faculty, to solve challenges facing the health field.
Other consortium members are hospitals, suppliers and medical supplies distributors, mostly private companies like Boston Scientific, Catholic Health Initiatives and Premier, Inc.; VA was the first public entity to join.
“There are lessons to be learned from both sides,” said W.P. Carey professor and HSRC co-director Eugene Schneller.
Schneller and others hope that VA takes methods learned from the private companies and that the private companies can learn from VA.
“The companies involved in HSRC hope to provide for a comprehensive health care system," Schneller said.
VA joined the HSRC to participate in collective purchasing, a method of buying supplies in bulk with a large group of similar consumers, according to a press release from the W.P. Carey School of Business. The HSRC has helped its members to save over $36 billion annually, Schneller said.
“Over the past few years, our budget has grown, but we expect it to the stay the same or go down in future years, even as we have more veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,” said Daniel Coakley, program manager at the VA.
Coakley said that working with the broad spectrum of members in the HSRC will help VA, the largest medical provider in the country, to understand supply chains better.
Jim Woodring, chief logistics officer for VA’s Southwest Healthcare Network, agreed.
“We’re trying to reengineer our supply chain management,” Woodring said.
Over the past few weeks, he has participated in a conference call and a meeting with other members of HSRC.
Another goal is to find a way to provide for the changing veteran demographic, Schneller said.
The current military operations in the Middle East means the U.S. has a greater population of younger veterans and the emergence of women in the armed forces has called for health care for female needs, including pregnancy, which the VA promises to do on its official website.
With increasingly better psychological research, VA has also felt the need to provide mental health services for soldiers suffering from illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder, also promised on the official VA website.
Schneller said that the VA could relay information learned from the private companies in HSRC to other government agencies to affect the current health care reform positively.
The VA also looks to join in on some research projects put on by the HSRC, Coakley said.
“We will probably use their research on standardization, an issue which affects all hospitals,” Coakley said. “When you hire a surgeon, for example, he wants specific tools, and then another surgeon wants other tools. Instead of buying 100 sets of the same instruments, we end up purchasing 5 copies of 20 different sets.”
The collaboration between VA and HSRC is still in its infancy, but Schneller and Coakley both expect great things to come from it.
Reach the reporter at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter
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