Welcome to 2023! Direct Supply® DSSI™, the nation’s leading procurement platform for Senior Living, is ready to partner with its providers to drive procurement savings and healthcare purchasing efficiencies. 

As you think about your business goals for this year, don’t forget about how DSSI can help you centralize your procurement. The tools within the DSSI platform assist in cleaning up your data, increasing contract compliance and ultimately driving cost savings.

Here are some healthcare procurement tools and tips to make the most out of the DSSI system in 2023:

Budget Control

Eliminate the need for manual spend-down sheets and processes. Budget Control provides you with more visibility to your budgets; it lets you know where you stand before you place your orders, reduces the need for manual processes, and it alerts you when you are trending over your budget or when you are already over budget.

If your organization is using Budget Control, there are Budget Control Reporting capabilities that allow you to look at your budgets from numerous perspectives, including from the location level, organizational level, and GL level. Review these reports to determine facility and organizational trends and establish necessary controls. 

DSSI Capture

Review your non-DSSI off-system spend and look for opportunities with your DSSI Customer Success Manager to consolidate major categories with a DSSI vendor program. For those local vendors that will remain off-system, consider DSSI’s Capture offering to give your team a consistent and efficient process to get these invoices to automatically flow through your AP system like your other DSSI invoices!

Compliance with DSSI Interactive Reporting

The Interactive Reporting (IR) in DSSI is a great tool to use to review both system and program compliance on DSSI. This tool provides a real-time visual into how your organization is performing, and even allows you to look at a location level. Identify the top locations where there is opportunity for improvement and work with them throughout the year to improve their purchasing process.

Locations, User Accounts, Approvals 

DSSI has self-service tools for Location Management, User Management, and Approvals Management. Conduct a quick audit of your locations and active users by running a location report and an active user report out of the DSSI Data Center. It is also suggested to review your regional and approval hierarchies and work with DSSI Support to adjust as needed. 

Supplier Order Guides 

DSSI understands the importance of leveraging your supplier relationships! Because of this, we recommend that you run the Supplier Order Guide reports out of the DSSI Data Center for your top suppliers and ensure that your GPO contracted items are in the DSSI system and on your order guides. 

For your OGM® 3 suppliers, consider building out order guides specific to the needs of locations. Help achieve better compliance in 2023 by narrowing down order guide items even further for your locations.

Training Sessions 

It is encouraged that DSSI end users have regularly scheduled training to promote efficiency in their day-to-day usage of the system, reinforce system and program usage, and learn new features as they are released. DSSI offers bi-monthly training opportunities that end-users are encouraged to attend, but we suggest that your internal team continually discuss how to best use the system to drive procurement and time savings.

We hope these tools and tips are helpful to your team as you progress through 2023. The DSSI team is excited to help your organization continue to drive procurement cost reduction and operational efficiencies this year and beyond. Reach out to our team today to learn more.