Supply Chain & Purchased Services Optimization
Supply chain isn’t just a cost center. In the right hands, it’s your strongest margin lever.
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Protect margin, ensure supply continuity, and build the governance your health system needs to perform now and in the years ahead.
Health systems today face a supply chain environment unlike anything in recent memory. Tariff-driven price volatility, persistent inflation in purchased services and IT, cybersecurity threats cascading through supplier networks, and a coverage landscape reshaped by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act are converging to put real pressure on operations and margin. Meanwhile, care is migrating rapidly to non-acute settings, expanding the supply chain footprint well beyond the walls of the acute care hospital.
Most organizations know their supply chain needs attention. Fewer have the governance, data, and clinical alignment to do something about it.
Why This Matters Now
- Federal policy changes and coverage shifts are increasing uncompensated care and changing patient acuity, adding cost pressure at the same moment supply expenses are rising
- Geopolitical instability and global supply chain exposure are creating contract volatility that organizations without price protection structures are poorly equipped to absorb
- Purchased services and IT spend are growing faster than clinical supply costs in most health systems, yet remain the least governed category in the portfolio
- Cybersecurity threats increasingly originate within supplier networks, not just internal systems, making supply chain a risk management issue as much as a financial one
- Care is moving to non-acute settings faster than most supply chains have followed, creating compliance and cost exposure across the extended care continuum
- AI-enabled supply chain automation is already delivering measurable ROI, and the gap between early adopters and laggards is widening
How We Help
Acuvance Coker’s Supply Chain & Purchased Services practice works alongside your team to build the strategies, contracts, governance, and clinical partnerships that translate supply chain into sustained margin performance. Our work spans the full supply chain continuum.
Med-Surg and Physician Preference Items
Standardization and price protection are only as strong as the contracts behind them. We work with your team to align clinicians and service line leaders around what can be standardized, and negotiate agreements that account for total delivered cost, not just unit price. That means building in hard escalation caps, tariff pass-through transparency, fill rate commitments, and benchmarking clauses that preserve leverage after the contract is signed.
Purchased Services and IT
We bring structure to one of the most fragmented cost categories in healthcare. Through competitive bidding cycles, centralized governance, supplier accountability frameworks, and contract management tools, we create the visibility and control your organization needs to manage purchased services as the margin lever it is.
Value Analysis Modernization
We help health systems replace slow, committee-driven value analysis with a tiered, operationally focused model. Commodity items move quickly with empowered nurse advisors, and clinical preference items follow a structured formulary process. High-impact items, including implants, robotics, and capital equipment, go through a service line-led, physician-partnered review supported by supply chain, so value analysis becomes a decision engine, not a bottleneck.
GPO Strategy and Contract Portfolio Management
We help you evaluate your GPO and purchasing alliance relationships on their full merits, including pricing, analytics, technology, services, and admin fee transparency, and negotiate for the total value of the deal. We also conduct comprehensive portfolio audits covering direct contracts, purchased services, and compliance performance to identify where value is being realized and where it is being lost.
Supply Chain Resiliency
Resiliency isn’t about carrying more inventory. It’s about building the operational capability to maintain uninterrupted, safe, and affordable patient care when disruption happens. We help health systems define critical item lists, establish dual sourcing strategies, develop pre-approved substitution protocols, build supplier accountability structures, and create executive dashboards that translate data into action.
AI and Automation Readiness
We help health systems assess where supply chain automation is ready to deploy, build the governance framework to adopt it responsibly, and develop the internal capability to sustain it over time.
Our Approach
We embed, not advise from a distance.
From opportunity analysis through implementation, we work alongside your supply chain, finance, legal, and clinical teams. We don’t hand off a report and leave. We stay engaged until results are realized.
We bring clinical credibility into the supply chain.
Supply chain savings in high-impact categories require physician and clinical leader alignment. Our bench includes clinicians who understand both the evidence and the operational realities, which means we can drive conversations that purely financial teams cannot.
We focus on total delivered cost, not unit price.
Price is one variable. Freight, substitution costs, waste, inventory carrying costs, and labor touch costs determine what you actually spend. We build that discipline into how contracts are structured and how performance is measured.
We work across the full portfolio.
Med-surg, physician preference items, purchased services, IT, GPO strategy, resiliency: these categories are connected. Organizations that manage them in silos leave real money on the table. We bring an integrated view.
No cookie-cutter playbooks.
Every health system has a different contract portfolio, a different governance structure, and different clinical relationships. We design strategies that fit your specific situation and align to each hospital’s context within the broader system.
What You Gain
- Measurable margin improvement through disciplined contracting, standardization, and purchased services governance
- Price protection and contract structures that hold value through tariff volatility and market disruption
- A value analysis program that makes decisions at the pace the environment demands
- Supply chain resiliency that protects clinical continuity, OR throughput, and procedure area performance
- Governance over purchased services spend that most organizations have never had
- A GPO strategy built around the full value of the relationship, not just the market basket
- Executive-level visibility through dashboards and analytics that turn data into actionable decisions
- A supply chain function positioned as a strategic asset, not a procurement department
Experts, focused on your needs.
- Step 1Follow-Up Sessions
We begin with customized follow-up sessions, offered virtually or on-site, to discuss your specific areas of need and identify the right areas of partnership. - Step 2Opportunity Analysis
We complete a comprehensive opportunity analysis by spend area or service line to identify where the greatest margin potential and supply chain improvement opportunities exist. - Step 3Governance and Reporting
Working in partnership with your team, we develop a governance and reporting structure for each identified opportunity area, creating the accountability framework needed to sustain results. - Step 4Benchmarking and Analytics
We complete benchmarking and spend analytics across your supply chain portfolio, available as an ongoing Analytics-as-a-Service capability to support continuous performance monitoring. - Step 5Evaluation
We conduct a detailed evaluation of specific services, supplier relationships, or facilities, providing the data and analysis your leadership team needs to make informed decisions and take action.Paul
Why Trust Coker
For more than three decades, Coker has been a trusted partner to healthcare leaders and investors, delivering clarity, compliance, and confidence through every stage of the transaction and beyond.
Positive outcomes are possible for you and your patients.
We approach every engagement with a results-driven mindset, leveraging our deep industry expertise and data-driven insights to develop strategies that drive meaningful, measurable improvements in performance.
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Solutions We Offer
We partner with clients to navigate the dynamic challenges of managing a high-performing physician enterprise.
