Vaatsalya Healthcare, a pioneer in semi-urban and rural healthcare in the country, has partnered with Audech Solutions to develop procurement management systems for hospitals. The new solution known as Procure Xpress is an online collaborative web-based hospital supplies procurement management system.

The product is an open source technology based procurement suite designed to support the entire requirement to fulfilment cycle of hospital equipment and supplies for mid-sized hospitals in a transparent and centralized manner.

The company which uses Procure Xpress has seen economies of scale as the solution has helped to reduce the procurement process time from five days to two days not only for operations within the company but across more than 100 suppliers across the country.

Vaatsalya is in discussion with other hospitals outside its network who have shown interest in the Procure Xpress platform to streamline their internal procurement processes, according to Dr Ashwin Naik, CEO, Vaatsalya Healthcare Solutions Pvt Ltd.

Procure Xpress builds on Vaatsalya’s existing procurement management process by web-enabling and expanding the requisition, indenting, approval, budgeting, contract, catalog, inventory and reporting functions of the system. It also delivers on-demand reports that enable participating hospital partners to rapidly identify procurement-related cost savings opportunities.

"The new system will leverage our extensive procurement management expertise and compliment it with web-based system to improve the performance of the procurement life-cycle for our own hospitals and our healthcare business partners," he added.

The hospital part of Vaatsalya is located at Mandya, Mysore, Gadag, Gulbarga, Hassan, Bijapur, Shimoga in Karnataka besides Vizianagaram and Narasannapeta in Andhra Pradesh.

It allows hospitals to establish control of the procurement and streamline the supply chain management. It provides a centralized payments department for suppliers and has considerably improved on the existing paper-based procurement systems, said Dr Veerendra Hiremath, COO, Vaatsalya Healthcare.

There is increased operational efficiencies. Procure Xpress has driven significant actual and time-based savings. Further, there is tight control over purchases. It provides the ability to link many suppliers to one product, comparing pricing and service levels, and creating individual catalogues of relevant products for each hospital. Products and prices are updated centrally, automatically ensuring instantaneous changes to each hospital catalogue. “This control offers an immediate benefit by eliminating out of budget spends,” stated Dr Madhuri Umeshchandra, project coordinator, Vaatsalya Healthcare Solutions.

All items are mapped to the correct General Ledger expense headers and all users are linked to respective cost centre code, enabling the system to generate accurate costing reports. The information, reconciled to payment data, can be electronically imported into accounting systems, she stated.