Cardinal Health's OptiFreight Logistics launches TotalVue Analytics

OptiFreight Logistics, a Cardinal Health company, is rolling out TotalVue Analytics, a tool for healthcare supply chain leaders to utilize predictive technology and data to identify logistics savings and benchmarking.

Leveraging the scale of Cardinal Health, TotalVue Analytics provides health systems with visibility into shipping trends to identify opportunities to reduce freight costs, including inbound shipments from suppliers or outbound shipments from sites of care.

"This solution gives our customers actionable data," said Melissa Laber, senior vice president and general manager at OptiFreight Logistics. "With full visibility into every shipment, health system leaders can improve their efficiency and tracking and realize substantial long-term cost savings."

OptiFreight Logistics utilizes machine learning for its benchmarking capability, which is driven by proprietary access to data and insights. "No two hospital systems are exactly alike, so we use the power of machine learning to find the best peers in the industry for comparison," said Marc Long, director of Business Intelligence at OptiFreight Logistics. "This ensures benchmarks are as accurate as possible and enables more informed, effective logistics management decisions."

With TotalVue Analytics, users can monitor the performance of a logistics management program, including how small changes in shipping decisions can create continued savings. For example, TotalVue Analytics can identify cost savings opportunities such as a supplier that is shipping too many packages overnight, or a location that is not using the program to get shipping discounts. By reviewing consistent data points, health systems can set measurable goals and track performance.

Management of shipping spend across the health system is essential to identify maximum efficiencies, and visibility into critical logistics management metrics, which creates material cost savings.

Several customers participated in a pilot launch of TotalVue Analytics, including Mike Halmrast, senior director of contracting at Banner Health, a non-profit health system based in Phoenix that operates 28 hospitals and several specialized facilities across six states. According to Halmrast, the more inbound, outbound and large freight shipments the health system has under management, the more dollars it can save to spend on patient care.

"It's that simple," Halmrast said. "That is where our collaboration with OptiFreight Logistics comes in to play. They work in our best interest to identify more ways for us to centralize spend." From a data analytics perspective, Halmrast said the collaboration with OptiFreight Logistics has been especially beneficial to encourage the supply chain teams at individual facilities across the health system to engage with the data and monitor their own performance.

"At OptiFreight Logistics, we're focused on creating data and analytics solutions that meet our customers' needs — now, and in the future," Laber said.