When thousands of private hospitals across India battling low-occupancy rates and turning unviable for nearly more than a year now due to the Covid-19 pandemic, StratMed, Group Purchasing startup has evolved as India’s largest group purchasing organisation for consumables including medicines, helping Indian hospitals to improve margins.

StratMed – India’s one of the largest data-driven, healthcare performance improvement startup in India introduced the different strategy towards Intelligent Consumption and Spend Management. StratMed uses network-powered insights and its proprietary tools to work on all cost levers across critical areas of clinical, operational and supply chain performance.

Globally, Group Purchasing Organisations have brought to the table the advantage of bulk purchasing/procurement. Better pricing resulted in improved margins and helped hospitals to run in better sustainable mode even in this pandemic. StratMed is going beyond the traditional “Bulk Purchasing” Approach and is adopting a CQO (Cost – Quality – Outcome) Approach across three key intervention levers – Commercial (Price), Process and Consumption Optimisation. There by ensuring that Clinical Outcomes are not adversely impacted due to a reduction in the Cost of Care Delivery.

Today, StratMed is well-positioned to offer its partners better Cost Savings than Industry Benchmarks. It is able to do so by leveraging its large-scale demand aggregator model and Direct Rate Contract Negotiations with the Manufacturers and bringing Clinical Expertise to the table for improved Brand Standardisation and Brand Mix Planning. Unique to StratMed is its data-driven analytics approach for monitoring purchase trends and enabling better price-parity. This is done at multiple levels – Category-based, Product-based, SKU-based, Region-based and most importantly Payor-based.

Currently, managing 9500 beds and a Purchase Volume of approximately INR 650 crores. StratMed has partnered with hospitals like Cloudnine, Apex Group of Hospitals, NRI Medical College and Hospitals, Birthplace, Charak Hospitals, Alexis Hospitals and is on track to onboard some of the larger hospital groups in India. StratMed ensures that the outlook for healthcare providers moves from cost focus to value focus.

 According to Dr Sameer Khan, Founder and CEO, StratMed, “Globally, Group Purchasing Organisations have brought to the table the advantage of bulk purchasing/procurement. Better pricing resulted in improved margins and helped hospitals to become more profitable. Till recently, many smaller hospitals held the misperception that sourcing aggregation benefits require higher purchasing threshold and as a result, continued to operate in silos. With StratMed, many hospitals have started seeing the advantage of an integrated, collaborative and data-based approach. By working closely with the manufacturers of medical consumables and hospitals, we help hospitals get better rate contracts by aggregating the demand and also help improve supply chains. We also help manufacturers prune down their cost of sales, thereby improving their margins as well.”

StratMed earns at an average of 2–4% of the purchase price of hospitals as its revenue, is set to close the next financial year, with over 20,000 hospital beds spread across cities worth over Rs 3,000 crore. The annual purchase value of Private Hospitals – INR.60,000 crore is growing at CAGR of 17%.