Connecting with 300 healthcare agencies for complex sourcing projects

Serving 120 hospital members and over 300 additional healthcare organizations in Ontario and the Maritimes, Mohawk Medbuy leverages clinical expertise and maximizes buying power to offer high-quality and best-priced medical/ surgical products and pharmaceuticals.

Connecting with 300 healthcare agencies for complex sourcing projects

We spoke with Joe Procaccini, Strategic Sourcing Manager at Mohawk Medbuy, about how Bonfire, a Euna Solutions brand, has helped him drive value for healthcare clients. Here’s what he had to say: What were some of the challenges you were facing prior to implementing Bonfire? Our biggest challenge was the lack of technology. It was a lot of manual paperwork that was being transmitted to our evaluators to review once tenders were closing. Obviously, we saw this as a huge opportunity to embrace the technology component and remove some of the added cost of moving documentation around, from a supplier perspective as well as an end user perspective. That was the biggest win.

When it came down to reviewing Bonfire’s package, the biggest advantage that we saw was the ability to do the side by side scoring through Questionnaires.

Was there a specific tipping point that sparked the need for a software solution?

It was really the needs of our members asking for more diverse groups of evaluators. In a given project, you could have several groups of individuals from a hospital that were participating in an evaluation, which adds additional cost and complexity to get them copies of the documentation. To be able to use technology to assign users to an evaluation bucket and distribute documents digitally was one of the big factors.

What are the benefits of Bonfire?

The fact that it’s so user-friendly. The fact that information is readily accessible. The fact that vendors like it — we’ve received no resistance from the vendor community to using it, which is also key. The fact that it’s scalable in the sense that you can modify users, add evaluators, and change roles and responsibilities fairly seamlessly.

Is there a particular feature or aspect of Bonfire that makes your life easier?

The report running functionality is a key feature that I like to use quite a bit. I can check on evaluators’ statuses to see how much they’ve completed and review their scores as well. Part of my responsibility is to make sure the project continues on time and there are no delays to the process. The ability for me to keep on top of my evaluators, to make sure they are completing their tasks in the required time, and to anticipate if they need any additional time or if they’re having any challenges, that really helps me with the project management side of it.

What’s the feedback from evaluators?

The feedback has been good. They like the ease-of-use of being able to open and score files and supporting documents from submissions at their fingertips, as opposed to having to go through several different screens or modules to put in a score. The user-friendly piece is key for evaluators. As with anything, if it’s a difficult process, your rate of adoption is going to be much lower. The fact that it’s user friendly is critical for our group.

How has Bonfire impacted your results?

We’re driven to make sure that projects stay on time. That’s the key metric for us, and as it relates to Bonfire, it is really making sure that from a project management perspective, we’re able to stay on task and complete the project on time. Whenever you’re moving paperwork around, you always run the risk that some data get lost, some documents get lost, people misplace them in their files – whereas in Bonfire everything is in a clean and simple package that’s accessible through their User ID and login. It keeps everything well-organized and managed.

The fact that it’s user friendly is critical for our group.

Can you give an example of a specific project where Bonfire has had a big impact?

Personally, I led a provincial project on a product called radiopharmaceuticals, a nuclear medicine based drug application product that’s used within the hospital. It was a very complex multiple stage, multiple product category project. I had about 90 users on my committee, around 50 of whom were evaluators. They were located all across the province of Ontario as well as PEI. A lot of my users were outside of the Mohawk Medbuy umbrella because it was a provincial project, so many of them were not used to the Bonfire application at all. I had to do webinars for those individuals in other hospitals who had never seen the tool to get them integrated. The Bonfire team was extremely helpful in making sure all users felt that comfort level, and we managed to do 100% of the scoring within the tool. This was critical because if your evaluators are scoring outside the tool, you’re susceptible to doing a lot of manual calculations for end results.

To be honest, I don’t know if we would have been chosen to be the leader of that project if we didn’t have an automated tool — it would have been too much to manage with the scope of the evaluation.

Do you feel that the investment in Bonfire has been worthwhile?

100%. I couldn’t imagine doing it without Bonfire, to be honest.

I couldn’t imagine doing it without Bonfire.