A health group purchasing organization is actually an entity which promotes qualitative healthcare and helps managing expenses of the providers. They can also regulate the purchasing value of their customers (such as pointing out exactly how many syringes a hospital needs for example!), and they also close very good contracts with suppliers, thus allowing customers to buy at group price (discounted).
GPOs are an extremely important entity and player in the healthcare field. In a quite recent study, there has been reported that more than 70% of the respondents of a survey stated that GPOs helped them save between 5% and 7% on their healthcare supplies. Talking about enormous quantities, these are also huge savings. The rest of the respondents, that is around 25%, said that their savings accrued to 11% +. Group purchasing organizations are in an extremely tight competition on the market.
This is so, mainly because their profit is in the commission they get- so the more members they can have, the greater the profits for the GPOs. Just as all the systems of the world, GPOs attract negative comments and harsh critique as well. It has been many times told, that they do not put emphasis on quality, but only on quantity. This means, that if their profit skyrockets, if they buy tons of low quality supplies for hospitals, they will do it simply fort the profit, without considering other factors.
If you are interested to know more about health GPOs and want to get “inside” of the system, make sure to watch the upcoming extraordinary medical thriller
”Puncture”.
