A major healthcare alliance is providing a data analysis service to help member hospital organizations analyze purchase data and identify savings opportunities.

Premier Inc., which provides group purchasing and other services for member organizations, introduced the service, Spend Manager, last month. The official rollout is slated for July.

The announcement represents another step in increasing the use of automation in healthcare supply purchasing, as hospitals and delivery systems try to take advantage of technology to improve purchasing practices.

Spend Manager extracts data from hospitals’ materials management systems, said Marla Weigert, group vice president for contract management for Premier. The data is processed and “cleansed,” enabling it to be loaded into analytical tools.

The analysis can be performed through Premier’s Web site so supply purchasers can analyze what products are being spent and if they can maximize savings by either taking better advantage of Premier contracts or by consolidating fragmented purchases.

Because many integrated delivery systems are integrated in name only, buying decisions tend to be fragmented, which often adds expense to supply procurement.

The tools also permit cross-referencing, which enables materials managers to find supplies with similar attributes to find the best possible price.

“These tools help them manage more prospectively,” she said. “They can do aggregation across multiple organizations. A lot aren’t centralized (in purchasing); there’s often a disparity between hospitals buying the same exact product, often because there’s no transparency in what’s being bought.”

The application has been tested by nine healthcare systems, operating about 60 facilities, in the past year, and it is achieving its purpose, facility executives said.