Our Commitment to Supply Chain Integration

To the Johns Hopkins Medicine community

Dear Colleagues,

Johns Hopkins Medicine is committed to providing the highest-value care to eliminate preventable harms, improve clinical outcomes and experiences, and reduce waste in health care delivery. Since 2014, Johns Hopkins Medicine has identified supply chain improvements to ensure quality and consistency in the way we source products and services while maintaining our patient care standards. We have been able to address rising costs and better integrate our health system, and to sustain this progress, we ask for your continued commitment to our mission to integrate supply chain improvement efforts across the Johns Hopkins Health System.

To date, we have achieved $100 million in cost savings on supplies, capital equipment and services. A portion of these savings is attributable to the standardization of products and services throughout the institution. This ultimately gives us more leverage in negotiating contracts with suppliers. However, our analysis tells us that we have the potential to realize even greater cost savings while maintaining or enhancing the quality of service we provide. In order to achieve this, we will need greater collaboration among all departments and entities, wherever it is consistent with excellent patient care.

When our supply chain team evaluates new services and products, it may call on you for your thoughts and expertise. We ask that you answer the call, because your support is vital to the effort's success. Your leadership and input are crucial to helping us make effective decisions and obtain maximum-value contracts for Johns Hopkins. Lastly, we need you to help our colleagues understand if there are any clinical impacts to these decisions, and identify the critical requirements for a new supplier so we can establish significant influence in the supplier marketplace.

If, after extensive analysis and vetting, we decide to move to a new supplier offering, your participation in exclusively using those supplies or services is necessary to support consistency of use, reduce safety risks, boost operational efficiencies and maximize our savings potential—savings we can put back into improving clinical outcomes. To provide guidance and operational support for the sourcing process, we are implementing a cross-functional committee of senior leaders from across the health system that will be called the Value Analysis Advisory Board. This group will help us resolve complex supplier-selection decisions in the best interest of the entire institution.

To improve, change is vital. Let us capture the opportunities ahead by acting as a truly integrated system.

Sincerely,

Paul B. Rothman, M.D.
Dean of the Medical Faculty
CEO, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Ronald R. Peterson
President, Johns Hopkins Health System
EVP, Johns Hopkins Medicine