E-Health's Execution Play
Executive Summary
Combining the benefits of a disciplined hospital system and a leader in e-commerce, the new joint venture between Tenet and Chemdex hopes to create a differentiated offering in e-health. The new company has the ability to integrate the hospitals and suppliers Tenet/BuyPower represents, thus providing the critical mass that e-commerce companies have, until now, lacked. But company officials insist that their real advantage is that they offer a different approach to e-commerce, one that focuses on an end-to-end solution tied to the hospital's ERP system, rather than simply a web site to make ordering and inventory management more efficient.
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Burden of Proof
Early efforts to define the opportunity for e-commerce identified the problem--an inefficient hospital supply chain--but failed to prove that e-commerce is necessarily the answer. Now, Novation and Neoforma, a leading hospital group and its e-commerce partner, have released an industry-wide look at Internet-enabled supply chain economics, done by consultants Arthur Andersen, hoping to prove the value to both providers and suppliers of widely implemented e-commerce.
In E-Health, MedAssets Bulks Up
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