Shannon Health*, a mid-sized health system in San Angelo, TX, has long sought a fair, transparent way to justify and evaluate capital funding requests. Consisting of two hospitals and 22 clinics, Shannon Health and its 270+ platform users use OpenMarkets to approve capital and minor equipment. Luke Martin, Administrative Director of Supply Chain Management at Shannon, knew he had the tool in place to add a capital scoring mechanism to their budget approval process. He just needed to be sure the health system was ready for the upgrade.
“We just weren’t satisfied with our current capital budgeting process and knew as an organization we could do better,” said Martin. “With so many requests coming in every year, we needed a new way to prioritize the list of needs, to create a more objective and streamlined ranking process. Fortunately, we have the OpenMarkets team and platform in place to enable us to make this process upgrade and ensure the organizations dollars were going to the most significant projects across Shannon.”
In previous capital budgeting cycles, there was no fully transparent way for Martin and others at Shannon to separate the requests that come in from various clinicians and service line leaders. Different prioritization tactics were used but there still wasn’t a strong concrete way to “grade” each request.
Like many other health systems, Shannon typically gets about 3-4x the number of requests they are able to approve for the annual budget. Given these circumstances, Martin teamed up with Director of Innovation Steven Short to come up with a new scoring framework to determine the grade on each request.
With the general scoring framework in hand, Martin worked with OpenMarkets to transparently add this to the capital budgeting and approval process. Now the platform automatically builds and transparently relays the scores on any given request.
“We are always looking for ways to improve our software and help our organizations optimize the use of our software,” says Dan Turner, Director of Implementation at OpenMarkets. “When an organization comes to us with a need, we do everything in our power to adjust our platform to meet both that organizations needs and any other organization who may benefit. Shannon’s scoring framework is something other health systems can do and should emulate.”
“OpenMarkets was able to build and configure exactly what Shannon Health needed, fast and accurately," said Martin. “We’re now able to assign values to the questions and answers asked during the capital budgeting process, and then based on those answers, serve up the total score on any given request. This is allowing us to take a much more objective and fair approach to capital allocation – which is helping us with clinician relations to the point where it’s positively impacting physician retention. Our doctors appreciate the fairness and transparency in our capital approach – which we couldn’t do without OpenMarkets.
*Shannon Health is a member of the TPC network. Shannon and other members of TPC use OpenMarkets not only to manage capital locally, but also to aggregate needs across the membership, driving improved capital contracts.
To learn more about how OpenMarkets' CAP Connect software can help you automate & simplify your capital planning process, please click here.
