About

CombineMed creates opportunity from the complexity of healthcare sourcing.

As one of the world’s largest industries, healthcare’s continued growth has resulted in exponential increases in product options and suppliers. Direct sales professionals, middle men, group purchasing organizations and other supply chain service consolidators promote and initiate various types of transactions at multiple points-of-influence inside healthcare organizations. Supply chain professionals face a difficult challenge—to say the least.

CombineMed brings healthcare organizations and their suppliers together via a revolutionary sourcing process called Expressive Commerce™, in which they collaborate in a more expressive marketplace to reduce costs and increase efficiencies across the healthcare supply chain.

Expressive Commerce enables healthcare supply chain professionals to consolidate spend across hospitals and other facilities in a way that presents to suppliers, for the first time, a comprehensive view of the market opportunity within the organization. Suppliers are empowered to submit an unlimited number of Expressive Proposals based upon the aggregate spend of the buying organization; leveraging their competitive strengths. CombineMed’s highly advanced combinatorial optimization technology simultaneously evaluates those proposals in conjunction with the healthcare organization’s business rules and preferences; analyzing more offers than ever before possible, in a healthier, more dynamic and more competitive market.

CombineMed’s advanced sourcing technologies and services empower supply chain professionals to achieve better balance between lowest cost and required service and quality levels, ensuring the alignment of key influencers and decision-makers across the healthcare enterprise. In addition to the immediate savings opportunities that are revealed, ongoing strategic planning with the CombineMed solution helps prepare your organization for the longer term conversion efforts that may result from one of our sourcing events.

History

CombineMed is delivering CombineNet’s advanced sourcing and supply chain optimization technology solutions to the healthcare industry. Founded in 2000 by Dr. Tuomas Sandholm, renowned computer science and applied mathematics researcher, and professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, CombineNet pioneered the use of combinatorial optimization in strategic sourcing and has developed an unparalleled expertise in the field.

More than 60 of the Fortune 500 rely on CombineNet for their most strategic sourcing initiatives. Innovative companies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG), manufacturing, pharmaceutical, retail and transportation industries have sourced nearly $40 Billion worth of materials and services with CombineNet’s advanced sourcing technology, achieving more than $4 Billion in realized savings.

In 2006, CombineNet introduced its technology to healthcare through a series of sourcing events with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). To date UPMC has used this technology to source and contract more than 90,000 medical & surgical items while achieving 10% savings while satisfying its contracting needs, operating constrains and physician preferences.

CombineMed is leveraging the combined strengths of CombineNet and UPMC to drive more value into the healthcare supply chain.