How to handle hospitals on different contract tiers?

I don't get into contracts much so I may be wrong but I believe you do have to create separate agreements for each tier if the participants are different on each tier. The contract management module may be able to handle this better but we don't have that.

Contract Management provides a Tier Cost structure by contract, which I'd assume isn't going to help you now! :-)

Jon's right on with the separate agreements and participants. Bigger picture, it would be a good idea to negotiate the pricing by organization not by company to better manage your price updates. Each company could benefit from the others spend for better pricing and also allow you to have a better standardized agreement structure.

Not sure if you use RQC, but you could also utilize templates to pull pricing from a specific agreement if you decided not to go the participant route? I think this came with 9.0.1.10?

We do exactly that- negotiate contracts based on aggregate spend for the entire health system. Our one caveat to this is our Home Care affiliate. They sell DME, diabetic and ostomy care supplies so to allow them access to the system contract pricing could violate fair trade laws.

Posted By Stephanie on 07/01/2015 8:55 AM
Contract Management provides a Tier Cost structure by contract, which I'd assume isn't going to help you now! :-)

Jon's right on with the separate agreements and participants. Bigger picture, it would be a good idea to negotiate the pricing by organization not by company to better manage your price updates. Each company could benefit from the others spend for better pricing and also allow you to have a better standardized agreement structure.

Not sure if you use RQC, but you could also utilize templates to pull pricing from a specific agreement if you decided not to go the participant route? I think this came with 9.0.1.10?

Hey Stephanie - I think we might have this but maybe it's not installed in our current build yet because I'm not sure where I'd add pricing at different tiers.

 

As far as bigger picture, I agree, we should be negotiating the pricing by organization. We have 30+ hospitals though and it's a bit hard to speak to every vendor to make sure we have price parity at the moment. 

Hi,
We are using MedAssets as well and also have 40+ hospitals. So I guess it's very similar to your situation.

What we're doing is:
1. If contract is open for all facilities and all have the same Tier, we don't add participants, leave it blank. And set the priority to 5
2. If contract is open for all but has different Tier, we create 2 contract headers, for Tier 1 (higher price one), we leave participant blank and priority set to 5.
For Tier 3 (cheaper price for example), we add participant and priority set to 4, so that only certain facilities can access these Tier 3 price and for these facilities, even though they can access both Tier 3 and Tier 1 contract, setting priority to 4 forcing Lawson to pick Tier 3 price first. And the rest of facilities only have one option, which is Tier 1 contract price.

I download files from MedAssets for all facilities and put them together, so that I can see which facilities accessing what Tier for all the contracts.
And I found the contract Tier does change from time to time, so it adds another complexity...

Hope this would help.