2007-up-and-comers-anand-joshi

Anand Joshi was on track to become a physician. It was what he had aimed for since he was a little boy watching his mom, an anesthesiologist, come home for dinner still in her scrubs. But along the way, he earned a business degree—along with his medical degree. As a result, the world lost a doc, but gained a gifted procurement specialist who understands how physicians think and can talk their language. As clinical procurement director at 2,163-bed New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Joshi leads sourcing efforts that shape a $400 million clinical products budget. He has developed physician preference committees that evaluate new products for high-cost areas like electrophysiology, interventional cardiology, interventional radiology, vascular surgery, and endoscopy—and says those efforts have saved the hospital about $10 million a year over the past three years. “Almost none of this was my plan,” Joshi says. “The opportunity to do the MBA came up almost two years into my med school time. I thought I’d take a year and see things from a different perspective. Once I was exposed to business elements and introduced to consulting, I migrated away from clinical practice.” But he completed his M.D. degree anyway, and he says those two letters give him credibility with physicians that pure business types can’t match. “When you’ve spent two or three years on the floor, you get a sense of what physicians may be thinking about,” he says. His goal in working with physicians isn’t so much to get standardized preferences but to ensure that the hospital gets the maximum value from the physicians’ choices and its own purchasing clout. “From a traditional purchasing standpoint, proliferation is bad, but if the devices are better, we can provide better healthcare,” he says. By systematically building physicians into the product evaluation and selection process, Joshi has established enough trust that they don’t often try to bypass him to work directly with vendors. While there’s probably still the occasional side deal—“We’re an enormous institution and we don’t have the bandwidth to track everything,” he says—virtually all clinical products are on a contract of some kind. “There has to be a way to get the best technology at a price that can still allow us to function as a hospital,” he says. “New York-Presbyterian is always doing cutting-edge work in every field. My team’s role is to get the best patient-care technology at the best contracted price.” Sponsored By: