Client Profile
Intalere is a professional supply chain company offering a comprehensive suite of services to empower healthcare providers to better manage their entire non-labor spend and ultimately deliver superior care. The client specializes in designing tailored, smart solutions that deliver optimal cost, quality and clinical outcomes. Headquartered in St. Louis, Intalere is now substantially owned by Intermountain Healthcare of Salt Lake City.
Business Challenge
Intalere was operating with a 2-3 month backlog of “Pricing Studies” pending to be delivered to prospective clients. The pricing study was identified as a critical step in Intalere’s selling process, as this study demonstrated the value of membership to prospective customers.
During this step, Intalere’s pricing analysis team received historical SKU volume and pricing information from potential customers and compared this price to the same or a comparable SKU within Intalere’s pre-negotiated distributor catalog. Intalere calculated the savings customers would have saved had they been members.
It took nearly 20 hours of effort for an Analyst to perform a single pricing study. 2-3 months of backlogged studies were waiting to be worked by the team. The current process was very manual, requiring data manipulation in excel, revisions to the pricing analysis template, and significant interaction with distributor websites in order to identify comparable products and look up the price. In addition, Intalere had limited visibility to in-process studies nor was there workflow or monitoring of in-process studies to ensure backlog was being managed appropriately.
Attempts by Intalere to automate the process were not progressing and the team was having to add headcount in order to operate to a reasonable backlog.
Solution & Approach
Auxis redesigned the end to end process for Pricing Studies through a series of process and technology changes:
- File and data preparation on for the pricing study were completion automated. This required a redesign of the analysis template including standarization on of the template for different types of studies and deployment of RPA UiPath to automate several of the data preparation on tasks. Upon completion by the robot, the robot saves the file in a shared folder and sends a notification email that the study is ready to be assigned to an analyst.
- The robot reviews purchase history detail provided by the customer and interacts with both distributor websites and Intalere’s proprietary matching database to identify comparable products for the analyst to review and confirm. Upon confirmation, the pricing analysis template generates the appropriate report to the sales team in order to review with the customer.
- Created a robot to interact with distributor websites nightly to gather updated SKU and location detail to be uploaded into Intalere’s proprietary matching tool to ensure that the most current information is being utilized in the price study process and to eliminate exceptions caused by unmatched items.
“Intalere’s investments in RPA automation in partnership with Auxis are successfully helping our healthcare members elevate their delivery of healthcare through a wide variety of use cases, including revenue cycle, operations, back office and more. Auxis has been a great partner to prove our mid-market clients that RPA is about generating revenue and not just managing costs.”
Richard Mackey
Senior VP, Information Technology
Intalere Healthcare Solutions
Results
After redesigning the end to end price study process, the effort to complete a study has been reduced by more than 50% with a payback on the investment of less than 6 months. Further the backlog of pending studies was eliminated.