For most hospitals and health systems, partnering with more than one wholesaler is a necessity. While primary wholesalers handle the bulk of medication purchasing, many organizations also maintain secondary or tertiary wholesaler relationships to navigate shortages, ensure continuity, and improve pricing leverage.
Yet when it comes to choosing which supplier to purchase each NDC from, the reality is often cumbersome. Pharmacy teams download reports from each wholesaler portal, manually compare prices in spreadsheets, and try to identify savings opportunities – one NDC at a time. It’s time-intensive, error-prone, and simply not scalable across thousands of products.
As a result, most hospitals are leaving significant savings on the table.
The Value of Looking Beyond Your Primary Wholesaler
Switching certain purchases from your primary wholesaler to a secondary supplier can yield meaningful savings. These price differences can stem from the wholesaler’s distribution arrangements, temporary discounts, or contracting nuances – and they add up. Especially for organizations with ambitious savings goals or tight budgets, these incremental savings can make a real impact while maintaining the same products and continuity of care. In one example, a healthcare organization found a 40%+ increase in quarterly savings potential by shifting just 1% of its primary wholesaler spend to a secondary supplier.
The challenge isn’t whether savings are out there, but rather finding and acting on them without draining your team’s time.
Technology Makes Multi-Supplier Analysis Practical
Manually comparing supplier pricing isn’t sustainable, especially for busy pharmacy teams balancing clinical and operational responsibilities. That’s why CostCheck added Multi-Supplier Analytics to its suite of procurement optimization tools.
Instead of navigating multiple portals, downloads, and spreadsheets, you can now systematically:
- Consolidate fragmented purchasing data across all your wholesalers and suppliers into a single, clear view.
- Compare pricing for identical products side-by-side to identify actionable price discrepancies.
- Receive proactive flags when a supplier switch could result in meaningful savings.
- Track and capture savings seamlessly within your existing workflow.
This approach transforms multi-supplier analysis from a time-draining manual process into an automated, easy workflow that surfaces high-value opportunities as part of your daily or weekly operations. One early user of this feature shared “the feature noticed an incorrect contract on an antibody drug with 340B pricing on a GPO account, which I have reached out to my primary wholesaler to fix. It also flagged a vaccine switch that could save us $20K annually.”
This goes beyond single-source savings to enable comprehensive procurement optimization. It’s not about switching everything to a secondary wholesaler or supplier – it’s about strategically identifying and capturing the best opportunities without additional manual work, ensuring your organization is always getting the best deal while maintaining supply stability.To learn more about CostCheck’s Multi-Supplier Analytics, download a one page overview here. Current CostCheck customers can reach out to their Customer Success Manager or email help@bluesight.com to activate this feature in your account.