Triose profits from health care efficiencies

April 29--Hospitals' top priority is providing the best patient care, not managing tens of thousands of supplies and specimens moving all around a health network.

Logistics companies such as Triose Inc. in Shillington have created a niche as a growing number of health care providers look for back-office cost-saving efficiencies.

"The way hospitals have operated in the past, they just basically have focused on the clinical aspect, not the business side of providing health care," said C.J. Joyner, president and CEO of Triose. "They couldn't tell you, prior to an organization like us coming in, where those products came from, where those products went, how they were moved, who moved them. What we're able to do is come in and take that information and tell them where the products came from and what's the most efficient way to move them."

As more hospitals look for savings, Triose is expanding into the West and the South while continuing to retain customers in the Northeast and the Rust Belt. The company has increased its revenue 40 percent annually in each of the last four years, putting Triose first on the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce & Industry's Top 50 Businesses list for 2014.

"It was a very good year," Joyner said. "We've hit our growth projections for the past four years in a row and we plan to do it again this year. We want to be No. 1 again next year."

He started the health care logistics management company in 1999. Today, Triose -- pronounced TRY-ose -- works with academic centers such as Cleveland Clinic, community hospitals like Reading Hospital and small rural hospitals.

Clients come to Triose to find information and make changes, and Joyner said they save 25 percent to 40 percent.

"There's a lot of different moving pieces and parts in the supply chain of a hospital," said Ira Tauber, Triose's chief operating officer and executive vice president. "Most of the time, the hospital won't have any knowledge of the visibility or an understanding of what they do. So we provide that visibility of that information."

Sometimes, hospitals will decide they don't want to spend to hire or train people to do this internally, so Triose becomes a logical place to outsource, Tauber added.

Triose handles everything from sutures and gauze to heart valves and specialty surgery items. Staff will work with the manufacturer to find the most efficient way to deliver. They'll also track electronic data from hospitals, freight carriers and suppliers with the Triose information system and use that information to find trends, create reports and suggest savings.

UPS started working with Triose in 2008 and named the company its channel alliance partner for hospitals in 2013.

UPS considers hospital logistics a key priority, with significant growth opportunity. Over the past three years, the Atlanta company has created several initiatives in response to changes in the business of health care, said Jerry Romanelli, vice president of enterprise health care sales for UPS.

"The demand for health care is becoming more and more important," he said.

UPS moves the freight, and Triose handles technical support for customers and vendors.

"There are other companies out there," Romanelli said. "We selected Triose because we felt we had the same standards and values."

Health care reform is forcing providers to change operations and find ways to cut costs. Since Triose's beginning in 1999, the company's saved its customers close to a billion dollars.

The company handles freight billing for Hanover Hospital. Since the hospital started working with Triose in 2009, vendors of medical and office supplies now send their shipping bills, hundreds of them, to Triose. The company consolidates the information and sends the hospital one invoice. That saves time and money, said Dan Keffer, the hospital's director of materials management.

Last year, the relationship saved Hanover 36 percent of its $104,000 freight costs.

"We're always asked to look for cost savings, and this was low-hanging fruit," Keffer said. "There was very little work that we had to do for the savings."

Triose continued to grow through 2008, but lost some business in 2009 due to the recession. The company retained staff, invested in technology and cut operations because management knew business would return.

"That really helped us because we were sitting in a good spot when the economy kind of picked back up and things started to move through the health care supply chain," Tauber said. "We had the people in place."

Since 2010, Triose's revenue has grown 40 percent annually by offering new services such as courier management to existing customers. It also has found new clients.

Triose has hired more employees as the company has grown. New hires need a customer service focus and aptitude more than a health care logistics background.

As hospitals have grown through affiliations and mergers, that's more opportunity for growth at Triose. There's also a push away from a centralized hospital to short-term and long-term care facilities and people's homes. That push requires supplies and medications to be moved back and forth.

"None of these facilities, even if it's a small critical-access hospital, they're not going to be functioning by themselves," Tauber said. "They're going to be part of a larger system either through an affiliation or a merger or an acquisition. So what's happened is, it's all changing. So the answer is, there's always going to be an opportunity, because these hospital networks are all changing."

And that's not a problem for Triose.

"Change is opportunity," Joyner said.

Contact Erin Negley: 610-371-5047

or [email protected].

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