Healthcare 'Amazon' helps to improve purchasing power
New website enables healthcare managers to test market for best value medical products
Owners of a healthcare procurement website that aims to become ‘the Amazon of the medical marketplace’ claim they could save the NHS more than £30m overnight through improvements in purchasing.
Medical Supermarket was launched to act as a portal for the procurement of common medical devices and equipment.
We network with the right suppliers to bring the right solutions for their businesses and, with a customer as big as the NHS, there is the potential for huge savings if trusts unite and trade as one
Through bulk buying, and testing the market for best price, the website aims to save NHS and private health trusts millions of pounds that can be ploughed back into frontline services.
Speaking to Building Better Healthcare , Udhi Silva, who set the company up with his partner, Nick Coleman, said: “Our mission is to improve world health by creating a place for healthcare companies to unite and trade as one. We believe that if local surgeries and community services worked with us, we could save the NHS around £30m overnight.”
The website has 60,000 available products aimed at a number of medical markets including primary care, secondary care, optometry, dental, physiotherapy, care and nursing homes and pharmacies. These include care beds, bathroom hygiene equipment, incontinence pads, workwear, drugs, anaesthetic products, blood pressure monitoring equipment, and respiratory devices.
Silva said: “We take the burden of searching the marketplace away from purchasing managers. They just have to come through us as a single portal. It’s like an Amazon for healthcare; a one-stop shop. We network with the right suppliers to bring the right solutions for their businesses and, with a customer as big as the NHS, there is the potential for huge savings if trusts unite and trade as one.”
The site has also taken measures to streamline the invoicing process, so just one invoice is created for each transaction, regardless of the number of different products purchased and the number of different providers.
We believe that if local surgeries and community services worked with us, we could save the NHS around £30m overnight
The procurement team will also search the market for any products not currently available. Silva said: “We understand that in healthcare there is no one-size-fits-all, so we aim to tailor our buying around individual needs. For example, if a nurse says they want something in white and we only have it in blue, we will look to source it in white at the best possible price. The customer does not pay the supplier directly, they pay us, so we are quite unlike many other buying groups.”
The website is already working with a number of NHS trusts looking to improve their purchasing power and has specialist buyers who are experienced in helping consolidate purchasing across multiple locations.
The launch of Medical Supermarket comes at the same time as current NHS procurement activities come under fire. This year alone three reports have criticised purchasing systems for being too fragmented and missing out on potential bulk-buying savings. In particular, collaborative purchasing is seen as a way forward and a way in which to make the billions of pounds worth of savings being demanded by the Government.
Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, which was responsible for one of the reports, said: “The Department of Health needs to be clear how, when trusts are independent of its control, it will achieve the essential savings it should enjoy from the joint, bulk buying of medical supplies and other consumables in NHS hospitals."
