The University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) has successfully deployed Gallion, which happens to be a cutting-edge digital technology solution developed by its innovation center, iHarbor. According to certain reports, Gallion is a cloud-based platform boasting the ability to optimize efficiency of bill-only transactions in the supply chain, thus transforming the management of high-cost procedures such as knee, hip, and spine surgical implants.
More on the same would reveal how the technology in question integrates rather seamlessly with electronic medical record and enterprise resource planning systems. Complimenting that would be the way it reimagines the bill-only supply chain management function by automating and standardizing the tracking and processing of consumption, charges, and contracts. Apart from that, Gallion also has the necessary means to provide sophisticated analytics and reporting, all for the purpose of dramatically improving accuracy, transparency, and compliance.
“We developed Gallion to disrupt the manual bill-only process and improve upon existing market solutions,” said Warren D’Souza, PhD, MBA, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at UMMS and leader of iHarbor. “Our goal was to create a seamless, standard workflow that enhances cost insight and vendor price knowledge.”
Talk about Gallion on a slightly deeper level, though, we begin from its promise to reduce or completely eliminate manual, error-prone, and tedious work associated with a fully digital bill-only solution particularly for clinical staff. Next up, we must acknowledge the potential it brings in the context of digitizing and automating item utilization, contract price compliance, and reconciliation processes at the point of care. Markedly enough, it does also that in real time, as well as with a single system to realize near 100% compliance rate.
Another detail worth a mention here is rooted in Gallion’s bid to leverage sophisticated analytics, and therefore, empower the supply chain team to review monthly spend and quickly evaluate their price and contract competitiveness. Rounding up highlights would be Gallion’s knowhow in providing clinical quality and patient reported outcomes data, data which is understood to be focused down to the surgeon, procedure, and implant level. The idea behind delivering such a lowdown is to ultimately enable improved outcomes and quality, while simultaneously opening options for bundled payment/value-based care contracting.
“Gallion has transformed our supply chain operations and reduced the administrative burden on our clinical staff to better align them with patient care,” said Kate Christner, Director of Business Operations for Perioperative Services at the University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center, a UMMS member organization/hospital. “We have reduced billing conflicts to 3%, increased our charge capture three-fold and we validate and approve 95% of our bill sheets with two hours of submission.”
To understand the significance of such a development, we ought to acknowledge that, before Gallion, UMMS relied on a manual labor-intensive paper-based process which had a substantial room for potential for errors and inefficiencies. In response, data from Gallion’s initial deployment across UMMS’s 11 hospitals shows that it was able to cut down on completion time by almost 75%, whereas on the other hand, defect/error rate was lowered from 18% to just 3%.
As for iHarbor, it was specifically established to develop digital products and solutions that address unmet clinical needs and business opportunities for transforming health care delivery and operations.
“The efficiency gains and cost savings we’ve achieved with Gallion are remarkable,” said Pat Vizzard, Vice President of Supply Chain Management for The University of Maryland Medical System. “Gallion has enabled tremendous collaboration among our clinical and administrative staff and supplier vendor representatives. It has enhanced transparency and contract compliance throughout our bill-only workflow from the operating room to the purchase order. We have captured millions in savings and improved our contract negotiations through Gallion’s robust reporting and analytics capabilities.”
Turning our attention towards University of Maryland Medical System, it is an academic private health system, focused on delivering compassionate, high quality care and putting discovery and innovation into practice at the bedside. In essence, UMMS is an integrated network of care, delivering 25 percent of all hospital care in urban, suburban and rural communities across the state of Maryland.
