In our latest Interview Series we spoke with Mat Oram, CEO & co-founder of AdviseInc, helping healthcare make sense of spend data and saving the NHS millions.
AdviseInc’s Price Benchmarking solution has benchmarked over 45,000 suppliers, 1.7m products and 245 hospital providers providing access to past national and local spend within 30 seconds. HTN asked Mat a few questions:
Could you tell me a bit about yourself and your organisation?
I have a background in engineering, procurement and consultancy and I co-founded AdviseInc 5 years ago with two other partners, Phil Stoyle and Ben Morgan-Gray.
Our tools transform bad / dirty data from trusts to provide visibility into expenditure that wasn’t there before. The problem was people couldn’t compare prices accurately, so we developed a spend analytics platform taking hundreds of millions of lines of data to accurately present spend information.
With the app you can see what everyone has paid so it removes the emotion out of purchasing and importantly inflated prices.
What is the most significant achievement for your organisation and what will be over the next 12 months?
A few years ago we presented to Jeremy Hunt, I was told I had 2 minutes to show the benefits of what we did and I should be clear and concise. 30 minutes later we were still going and the instant feedback was that every trust should have our system. I was on cloud 9 and walked out of the meeting only to be brought back down to earth in seconds when I was told you know that won’t happen, right. We then went through a tendering process for 6 months with 10 bidders to finally win the bid. The rest is history as they say…
Our platform is now being used by over 80% of NHS Trusts in England and is being used across all of Wales and Northern Ireland and is growing in Scotland. The tool has the potential to save between £50m and £250m a year for the NHS.
At launch, Lord Carter commented: “The purchase price index benchmarking tool, one of the key recommendations from my report to help save the NHS £700m through better procurement, has been delivered effectively, efficiently by AdviseInc and is helping trusts to save money at launch. This is the first time the NHS has seen full transparency of prices paid for products bought from more than 45,000 suppliers. No other health system in the world has this capability or transparency which means the NHS is armed with knowledge to reduce variation and secure the best deal.”
Next, we’re looking how we can help with product switching, we have covered historic information now there’s an opportunity to look ahead. We’re looking at linking products and using insight and knowledge to support product switching and cost savings. Plus expanding out internationally as we roll out our solutions in other healthcare markets.
We’re looking at future spend analytics, by using AI and algorithms to do things like predict and more intelligently analyse. We have also implemented machine learning to help remove some of the manual processing we do when working on our datasets.
What advice would you give to other organisations?
Get on and do it. Don’t look for problems, look at what can be done with what you’ve got. Stop making excuses!
Also realise that you can build good, quick, easy to use tools but people don’t always use them. Hold success sessions for users, help people see the value and trust they will (accepting you can’t please everyone!)
