Blog · Data quality and reconciliation · Healthcare and med-tech
How a medical device or supplies company rolls hundreds of ship-to addresses up to facilities and facilities up to health systems, the identifiers that make it repeatable, the assertion that catches a hospital under two systems, and why GPO compliance and product depth are wrong until this is done.
A medical supplies company's order system has forty thousand ship-to addresses. Its GPO agreements name a few hundred health systems. The path from one to the other is a mapping that, at most suppliers, lives in a spreadsheet nobody trusts. This guide sets out the three-level hierarchy, the identifiers, the assertions, and what goes wrong in compliance and depth reporting when the mapping is loose.
| Level | Example | Identifier | Measured here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health system | Regional IDN with 14 hospitals | System ID | GPO and system agreement compliance |
| Facility | One hospital | Facility ID (industry or supplier's own) | Product depth, category share |
| Ship-to | Central stores, OR suite, clinic | Order system ship-to | Nothing; a dimension |
Revenue rolls up all three. Compliance is measured at the system, depth at the facility.
invoiced revenue = Σ systems = Σ facilities = Σ ship-tos
And on any date, every ship-to maps to exactly one facility and every facility to exactly one system. A ship-to with no facility fails the first; a facility under two systems, which happens after an acquisition when both records are kept, fails the second. Both are listed.
The mapping changes. Hospitals change hands, clinics open and close, ship-tos are recoded. Every mapping row carries effective-from and effective-to dates, and reporting for a period uses the mapping as it stood then. Restating the past under today's mapping makes last year's compliance move without any purchase changing.
One system, one product category, one quarter, before and after the mapping was tightened.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Facilities under the system | 11 | 14 |
| Ship-tos mapped | 380 | 512 |
| Compliance to the system agreement | 91% | 74% |
| Facilities below depth norm | 2 | 6 |
Three acquired hospitals were on the system's contract and not in the mapping. Their purchases were reported as three unrelated small accounts, and the system looked compliant because the denominator was missing a quarter of its facilities. The corrected figure is worse and true, and the four newly visible facilities below the depth norm are the account manager's list.
Ship-tos counted as facilities. A hospital with forty ship-tos appears as forty small accounts and the depth measure collapses.
Mapping undated. Last year restated, compliance moves, nobody trusts the trend.
Acquisitions missed. The commonest cause of a system that looks compliant and is not.
Two identifiers for one facility. Supplier's own and an industry identifier both used, never joined. Pick one as the key and carry the other as an attribute.
Mapped once and dated, the ship-to master, the facility master and the orders produce revenue at all three levels, compliance at the system and depth at the facility, every month, with the mapping failures listed. Covirage builds this from the exports as they are. The healthcare page describes the setup, and the GPO compliance guide covers the measures the hierarchy makes right.
A ship-to is a delivery address: a loading dock, a department, a clinic. A facility is the clinical site those addresses belong to, a hospital or a surgery centre. A large hospital has dozens of ship-tos and is one facility.
Because GPO and system-level agreements are signed there, and compliance is measured against them. A facility-level compliance figure for a hospital inside a system on a system-wide contract is the wrong denominator.
The mapping is dated. A hospital that moved from one system to another on a date is under the old system before it and the new one after. Reporting for any period uses the mapping as it stood in that period.