Actually, this is a question we get quite often. I can sum it up easily—Artificial Intelligence (AI) and integration. Meperia’s Strategic Sourcing (MSS) product foundation is built on data. Content is at our core and, as such, we deliver real-time updates to manage the merger and acquisition activity in the market and transfer this knowledge directly to the enterprise resource planning (ERP), to maximize an organization’s investment in the ERP.
Our platform is based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) or machine learning:
- We have two patents on our technology, and we are the only product with patented AI. This allows us to effectively manage the daily/monthly churn while continuing to learn about each item.
- Machine learning affords us unlimited attribution of items. Today, we have over 187 distinct item attributes not including transactional type information. This sets us apart from our competitors. We leverage this technology to scrape websites looking for changes, decipher nightly customer files, and pass on what we learn through our platform.
The technology also helps assure we pass on accurate and high-quality information. Your data doesn’t hold much weight if it’s not integrated into the ERP and is not actionable. Most hospitals do not have the IT staff to manage file uploads, transfers, and potential failures. We recognize this issue and that’s why we built direct integration:
- Meperia manages the integration from our platform directly into the customer ERP, requiring a low IT lift from a customer standpoint.
- The customer approves the data, then has real-time access to the information within their Item Master. Say a contract price changed on a single item, rather than accessing the item in the ERP to do the update, the customer simply approves the change, and we update the pricing in the item master.
Lastly, we stand apart in our ability to create and manage functional equivalents. Our normalization process delivers those unlimited attributes:
- Strategic Sourcing leverages the attributes to produce item families. Item families, for example, are Biliary Stents, Coronary Stents, Esophageal Stents. These three families are all stents but serve vastly different purposes.
- Our functional equivalency allows for an item family to be built from the remaining attributes so that you can take a product and understand not only how many/often that product is represented internally, we also will look at the entire market. So, if you are working on an RFP for trauma-you could assess all humeral plates. We are vendor/MFR agnostic, we simply present data so that a customer is empowered to make the best business decision for their particular organization at that time.
Bottom line, with a churn rate of almost 30% in a hospital’s data set it is understandable why data is the DNA of your supply chain information.
About the Author
Kerry Bradford has 30 years of experience in the healthcare space including her current role with Meperia as Vice President of Client Services. Prior to Meperia, Kerry held several significant roles including with Allscripts and McKesson. After leaving the hospital setting Kerry spent time providing supply chain and clinical consulting services which eventually led to her current career path.