by
Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | March 01, 2011
From the March 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
In the end, GPOs might also do what much of U.S. business has done – look abroad.
“What you see are many GPOs now engaging in global sourcing, looking toward China and India to be able to global-source their products and as they do, they hope they’ll gain a strategic advantage,” Schneller says.
If anything, new practices and technologies that make it easier to work with vendors could get co-opted by GPOs. For instance, MEMdata and the GPO Amerinet signed a deal several years ago for Amerinet’s members to use a service run by MEMdata called BudgetMatch, which helps plan capital equipment budgeting.
“GPOs have been around for 100 years, and they will continue to provide services to hospitals,” Rooney says. “I think the core function of GPOs is here to stay, and the new dynamics of all the data and technologies out there will be interesting, and they will inform purchasing, but I don’t think it would be unrecognizable.”
In fact, the continued existence, and possibly relevance, of GPOs is one thing friend and foe might agree on. “Nothing has changed,” Sethi says. “I’m convinced nothing will change.”
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