Centralised Procurement

Crowd source buyers to centralise procurement of medications and laboratory materials helping bring down the wholesale costs for healthcare providers.

Medicines are fundamental inputs in any public health system and often the most costly. WHO reports that public spending on pharmaceuticals in developing countries represents the largest health expenditure, after staff salaries. Low order volumes by healthcare facilities, and inefficient, non-transparent procurement systems contribute to weak negotiation positions for healthcare providers to get the price price per unit of medication.

Our solution helps approved individuals, healthcare facilities, laboratories and health districts place orders on a centralised procurement platform to secure the best prices. Our system will sort orders based on volume, location and delivery urgency and pool them together into much bigger orders. Approved vendors are then invited to bid anonymously for different orders. Procurement officers can then review bids and select the most appropriate one based on their needs.

By taking a group of smaller orders and pooling them into a larger order our system is able to provide more leverage to bring down the wholesale price of medications and laboratory materials such as reagent solutions. Additionally, our platform’s ability to understand the historical market rate for different medications, any market conditions which could impact the bid price and international prices can help further with securing a fair price from vendors.

The result is a solution which helps healthcare providers reduce costs, improve people’s health, creates transparency for procurement and allow more vendors to compete on supplying healthcare materials aiding healthy wholesale competition.

Our solution is taking a system with has been historically been handled by governments and making it accessible to everyone. The technology is not new, but the application and approach is. One of the biggest sources of potential for this solution (other than cost savings)  is the ability to build a database of historical pharmaceutical bidding/sale price data, market conditions, geography and supply chains to generate a price predictive model which can help facilitate sustainable, open-access prices and help negotiate prices that are fair for both customers and suppliers.

Technology such as machine learning and model generation will help take multiple orders and ensure orders are appropriately pooled, fair bid prices generated and logistics co-ordinated to ensure the maximum benefit can be delivered for all parties at the lowest price.

Month 6 - Develop an minimum viable product (MVP) which helps healthcare procurement departments record and track healthcare and laboratory material orders. We aim to partner with ten different organisations, laboratories and institutions helping to provide them insights into their procurement processes. 

Month 12 - Twenty different facilities will be using our tracking service, and the first version of our centralised procurement software is being tested with three different healthcare facilities. We aim to have achieved the generation of a centralised order, vendor bid and buyer acceptance by the end of the year.

Our goal is to leverage use case studies demonstrating the cost saving of our centralised procurement system to sign more facilities onto our solution. The more organisations using the system, the higher volume orders we can generate and in turn drive greater price savings to customers.

Over the next five years we aim to be successfully generating orders for over 600 institutions in 1-3 developing world countries helping improve accessibility of healthcare to thousands of people.

Healthcare and laboratory procurement departments will be our initial primary customer focus. We will pitch our procurement tracking software as an initial first step and help ensure its integration into their department. After understanding their procurement process better we will introduce the centralised procurement platform demonstrating the cost saving benefits to healthcare organisations. The platform itself will be designed to run on modern web browsers for both desktop and mobile.

The solution is currently a conceptual idea with no customers.

We are currently reviewing different ideas for monetisation. These can range from a subscription based model where vendors pay to be able to place bid on the system or a % from every successful procurement sale is retained by our organisation. 

I believe in the Solve mission to help identify some of the worlds greatest challenges and helping nurture ideas and solutions to solve them. I feel that with Solve's network, connections and endorsement I can help improve the quality of life for people who most need it.

Helping bring endorsement and legitimacy to idea which will in turn help facilitate conversations with healthcare facilities, local governments and medical suppliers.