Over on Healthcare Matters, Tom Finn recently penned a great post examining three key lessons from where to focus procurement and supply chain initiatives in healthcare. But I believe we can apply his recommendations more generally. As Tom opines, when we started this blog "we intuitively knew that best supply chain practices are industry independent; that their applications in healthcare would yield extraordinary benefits. What are the three areas that Tom suggests which are industry independent yet particularly appropriate for healthcare? They're actually quite simple in fact: spend analysis, supply utilization and demand management. But how we apply the lessons by industry are certainly important.

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Criminal Drug Schemes -- Pharmaceutical Supply Pain -- To help manage the risk of drug approval uncertainty, most large pharmaceutical companies got rid of their non-core fixed primary and secondary manufacturing assets a long time ago. But it didn't stop there. For the pharmaceutical industry, the demand for contract services continued to grow -- almost every core business function could be outsourced -- providing large and small companies alike the opportunity to execute selected business lines in a virtual context. The industry's supply chain seemed transformed overnight.

Your PPACA Cocktail Party Primer... -- The best argument for the PPACA is to listen to those who are against it -- and visa versa (Churchill said something like that about Democracy, didn't he?). If that irony even remotely suits you, then you won't be surprised to know that every Republican-appointed judge has ruled against the constitutionality of PPACA and every Democrat-appointed judge has ruled for it. "Whatever happens to the legislation at the end of the day, the clear level of politicization in the judiciary is getting its day in the sun," wrote Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Not that it should make any difference, but in case you're interested, our Supreme Court is currently comprised of five justices appointed by Republican presidents (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito) and four justices from Democratic presidents (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan). Just to add a little more intrigue, Justice Kagan may have to recuse herself from the case.

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You've got to credit Wal-Mart with finding new markets to drive growth – in this case, in its own back yard. Over on Healthcare Matters , Tom Finn recently penned a piece summarizing and analyzing Wal-Mart's recent move to tap the growing market for healthcare products and services, selling direct to physician practices. But wait, there's more. Tom notes that "the company won't just sell to small office physicians, but will open its own offices" with in-store retail clinics "operated by contracted physicians, physician assistants and nurses who will be well trained in the use of tools that automate all possible administrative functions (from office registration through prescriptions and billing), driven, of course, by the use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs)."

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Spend Matters welcomes another guest post from NPI, a spend management consultancy, focused on delivering savings in the areas of IT, telecom, transportation and energy.

The healthcare industry has a data problem -- a big one. Compliance requirements, in addition to the sheer volume of patient, clinical and research data, has made healthcare a hotbed for Big Data. But just what is Big Data? Wikipedia defines it as the following:

Big data are datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. Difficulties include capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics, and visualizing. This trend continues because of the benefits of working with larger and larger datasets allowing analysts to "spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime."

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Spend Matters is pleased to present a post from regular contributor Gregg Brandyberry.

I read Bob Ferrari's July 22, 2011 blog on Supply Chain Matters titled Pharmaceutical and Drug Supply Chains are Failing – Why?? with great interest. For quite some time, I've felt that the complexities of the Pharmaceutical global supply chains were greater than the capabilities of those companies to control. Many factors contribute to this hypothesis, including offshored sources of supply from low-cost countries, mega mergers and acquisitions, major reductions in support staff (300,000 pharma workers laid off in the past decade) driving overall morale to new lows, margin reductions from declining NA market and a host of others.

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Spend Matters welcomes another guest post from NPI, a spend management consultancy, focused on delivering savings in the areas of IT, telecom, transportation and energy.

With HITECH, HIPAA 5010, ICD-10 and MU compliance deadlines looming, where are healthcare organizations overspending on IT this year? Below is a list of technology investments that -- driven by timing urgency and complex pricing -- present the highest risk of overpayment. Best-in-class purchasers will take specific steps to avoid the over-payment (which means their 2011 budgets will go much farther -- every dollar they save is a dollar that funds another project):

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