Vizient Enhancing Supplier Negotiations Video

Did some of you see the video Vizient did on Enhancing Supplier Negotiations? In the video they were bashing contracted suppliers and encouraged the hospitals to negotiate outside the contract to get enhanced value from the national agreement they agreed upon with the supplier. A true slap in the face to the vendor community. Someone complained and they made it private on Youtube. Does anyone have a copy or created a copy before it was made private? I think most of the vendors need to see how Vizient views its partnership with its suppliers.

I would say it goes much further than a slap in the face to the supplier community...

There are still videos up that refer to this - Vizient has a whole group dedicated to helping members renegotiate the contracts we have negotiated with them... its called Vizient Member Business Ventures. This approach is actually increasing rather than decreasing our cost of sales. Vizient is so big they literally represent nothing... everything has to be renegotiated, so if you give Vizient a good cost and then have to renegotitate off of it every time... what is Vizient worth? and it puts real aggregation contracts/relationships like HPG at risk.

If you attended HIDA this year - there was a panel of these groups (Mayo's Upper Midwest Purchasing group - staffed by Vizient employees was one). Vizient is getting paid by Mayo to renegotiate Vizient contracts and the Vizient employees doing this said the Vizient contract is just a starting place! What a deal for them.

Vizient / Provista contracting rep then told the room full of suppliers/distributors that increasing sales volume after receiving a contract is up to the supplier - "We have 200,000 customer and not enough reps to even know them all... you need to talk to the distributors"

Why anyone pays Vizient is beyond me, especially in nonacute market where almost none of their customers have even heard of them/Provista/MedAssets.

Even worse, we feed the parasite by telling customers we are GPO neutral

Their isn't a single SCM I've talked to that doesn't renegotiate every Vizient contract of any value - we build three drops into all Vizient contracts - one for them, then another when the regional purchasing coalition renegotiates, then another when the hospital/IDN renegotiate.

If every SCM know this and to renegotiate them - what's their value??

I’m just a simple field rep, but it seems to me that every GPO contract is virtually worthless from an industry perspective. They do not enforce contract compliance or discourage members from seeking better deals with contracted vendors. They’re all just feckless, bureaucratic middlemen. Zero value.

HPG would be the one exception where it matters - agree that the rest are all zero value

anonymous said:

HPG would be the one exception where it matters - agree that the rest are all zero value

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I have HPG customers that are great, and others that are not. It depends on the IDN. Tenet is great. Community Health Systems is the worst. They will whore out to any vendor willing to drop pants on price, while simultaneously expecting legit HPG vendors to honor the contract for the items they cherrypick. The only recourse is to report it to HPG, so you end up looking like a bitch-ass tattle tale and risking your existing business and relationships.

... one of many issues with CHS - won't be a problem too much longer

layoff Monday .... Vizient Provista = large layoff of already floundering staff ... they will better off where the total focus isn't on extracting admin fees at the lowest possible expense. I'll just continue to ignore their contract with us - just like their legion of affiliates already do

anonymous said:

... one of many issues with CHS - won't be a problem too much longer

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What is the meaning of this?!?!

CHS is in the middle of a $2B divestiture strategy / 'sell-off-spree'. Their assets are going to better operators - all of the issues stemming from their inability to manage their business won't be a problem too much longer...

anonymous said:

CHS is in the middle of a $2B divestiture strategy / 'sell-off-spree'. Their assets are going to better operators - all of the issues stemming from their inability to manage their business won't be a problem too much longer...

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I guess that’s good news, but it’s going to be hard to get the cat back in the bag at a lot of facilities. Once a hospital lowers their standards to save a few dollars, it’s tough to get them to go the other direction.