Over 90 Total Lots Up For Auction at One Location - WA 04/08

Q&A with Erick McKesson and Phil Rogerson, co-founders of Venddy

March 19, 2019
Erick McKesson
HealthCare Business News recently caught up with Erick McKesson and Phil Rogerson, co-founders of Venddy, the vendor relationship management platform and service company that helps healthcare institutions understand the vendor landscape, improve how they source software and services, and align purchasing decisions with their strategic goals.

HCB News: We hear a lot about vendor management in the supply chain world. You feel that healthcare in particular faces an unmet need for managing business partners in software and services. Can you say why?

Erick McKesson: More and more healthcare operations rely on third-party services and technologies to perform their daily functions, and the array of available partners is evolving extremely quickly due to massive venture funding, mergers and acquisitions, and a constant stream of new innovations.

How do hospitals and health systems navigate that landscape? The best options at the moment are through peer word-of-mouth or by searching out vendors at conferences. In both cases, it remains difficult to get unbiased, unembellished information. Vendors naturally take advantage of this gap to push their products and services, so that health systems often end up making purchasing decisions based on what sales representatives say rather than on a careful assessment of existing capacity, future needs, and the logical steps between the two. We feel that a Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) approach can be used to put the power of smart purchasing decisions into the hands of the buyer.

HCB News: You mention “VRM.” What does that really mean?

Phil Rogerson
Phil Rogerson: We think of it as a new approach to the complex multi-vendor environment. Health systems are traditionally more passive in their engagement with different vendors: they’re targeted or acquired by vendors who then use their own CRM [customer relationship management] platforms and tactics to manage the health system.

VRM turns the tables on that dynamic, and allows health systems to assess the need for a vendor, or, if you’re already in the relationship, to see how well the vendor is integrating with other systems and whether or not it’s living up to its promise.

You Must Be Logged In To Post A Comment