THE FIELD GUIDE
Hospital supply chain,
for the people who own the number.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Glossary: 32 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.
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.