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THE FIELD GUIDE

Hospital supply chain, for the people who own the number.

Not a curriculum. Six briefs on the economics your vendors already understand — GPO tiers, price creep, value analysis, benchmarking, and savings that survive an audit. Each one ends with what to do about it.

GPO & SOURCING

Your GPO price is a ceiling on chaos, not a floor on cost

What a GPO contract actually guarantees, how tier tables and letters of commitment work, and when local negotiation beats the national price.

6 min readRead the brief

CONTRACTS & PRICING

Price creep: how a signed contract gets more expensive without anyone deciding it should

Escalators, evergreen renewals, substitutions, and surcharges — the four mechanisms that quietly raise contracted prices, and the calendar discipline that stops them.

6 min readRead the brief

CLINICAL ENGAGEMENT

A value analysis committee that actually moves

Why value analysis committees stall, what the functioning ones do differently, and why physician-preference categories are a different game entirely.

7 min readRead the brief

MEASUREMENT

Benchmark a category without launching a data project

Category-level decisions don’t need a data warehouse. What a usable baseline actually requires, and why price and utilization must never share one number.

5 min readRead the brief

MEASUREMENT

Savings that survive a CFO’s audit

Why reported savings evaporate under scrutiny — and the one-number capture discipline that makes results hold up with finance a year later.

6 min readRead the brief

THE METHOD

The five pathways: every savings initiative is one of these

Competitive RFP, GPO optimization, renegotiation, physician-preference items, internal process — how to name the pathway before kickoff and staff the work to match.

7 min readRead the brief

The Glossary: 30 terms, defined for the negotiating table

Tier tables, letters of commitment, evergreen clauses, cost avoidance — the working vocabulary of hospital supply chain, without the student framing.

Open the glossary

The briefs are the method. The playbooks are the method applied.

300+ category playbooks carry this thinking into execution detail — savings math, stakeholder maps, negotiation tactics. Start with your savings range.

See Your Savings RangeBrowse Sample Playbooks