The health care field encompasses a wide variety of institutions such as huge medical centers, medium-sized or small hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, labs, and large physician practices. Every single one of them needs supplies and equipment in order to operate the daily business of taking care of people. Your level of experience and education will help to determine whether you are starting in a small agency or moving up into a director of purchasing at a large hospital.
What types of products will you purchase? First of all you have the capital equipment purchases to consider. This broad category includes medical equipment such as anesthesia machines, ventilators, laboratory centrifuges, magnetic resonance imaging equipment, and so forth. You also need to be knowledgeable about furnishing a hospital with beds; the office desks, and filing cabinets; sofas in the lobbies, etc.
You also need to have many different types of supplies. The electrocardiogram (EKG) machines do not operate without gel and electrode pads. The intravenous monitoring equipment is no good without catheters and medication packs. The secretaries need printer cartridges, and the list goes on and on. In buying jobs, you are the person who coordinates the acquisition of all these items.
From these many types of institutions and the huge assortments of products to be purchased, you can see there are a wide variety of positions in healthcare purchasing employment. You can begin your career with as little as a high school diploma, or perhaps you are a career professional with a Master's degree who is ready to assume a leadership role.
Most people start out in purchasing employment as expediters or warehouse clerks. At this level, you are usually not the one who orders products. But you are responsible for contacting a vendor, or supplier, to find out when an item will be coming or why it's late. You probably maintain a running inventory of available products and notify your boss when something needs to be reordered. Other beginners in this field work as supply clerks within specialized hospital departments, for example, a surgical technician who maintains the daily inventory in a hospital's operating room. The level of education necessary for these types of positions is either a high school diploma, a certificate from a surgical technician's program, or an associate's degree in business with some focus on marketing. The pay range varies from $20-30,000 per year.
If you are at mid-career level, you might consider employment as a contract specialist. In this capacity you will negotiate product or service purchases from vendors, including contracts with delivery and pricing specifications. Some of the interesting activities you might handle would be new product trial evaluations or bids for proposals. With trial evaluations, a vendor usually wants to approach an individual hospital department to assess its interest in a new product. Your role is to ensure that the vendor complies with the department's needs, such as identifying how the trial product will be supplied, which people in the department will use it, and the parameters of the trial. With bid proposals, several vendors are asked to submit quotations on goods or services. At this level and beyond, it is imperative for the buyer to maintain strict impartiality. When an institution chooses one vendor over others, those not chosen will want to feel comfortable that the choice was strictly unbiased and involved no kickbacks, to the decision maker. You can see that even though this is a middle level position, your demonstration of integrity and accountability will have much to do with your advancement from here. The pay range at this stage is $30-45,000 per year, depending on geographic area. You are likely to have a bachelor's degree for this type of job.
A top-level director of purchasing, sometimes called materials management coordinator or director of procurement assumes responsibility for supervision of all purchasing functions within a large agency. You are the person who manages the supply chain infrastructure so that all hospital departments receive supplies as needed. Your subordinates supervise inventory in clean and central supply rooms within the hospital. You should have knowledge of the loading dock logistics. You participate in regular hospital procedures such as review of annual departmental budget submissions. Your familiarity with product recalls ensures that no patient suffers because of faulty products being utilized within the hospital. If pharmaceuticals are missing, you interface with the department who signed them out and initiate security procedures. If a physician specialist wants to participate in evaluation of a newly patented piece of medical equipment, you facilitate the acquisition and review of the hardware involved. You work with other directors within the hospital, and your decisions impact staff in all departments. At this level in your career you most likely have a Master's degree, and your salary is close to $100,000 per year.
So which of these types of jobs fits you? Are you at the beginning of your career, or are you ready to become the primary or sole decision maker? This is an interesting time in our country to be working in the healthcare field. Many changes are likely to come down the road as a result of economic and policy redevelopments taking place. In order to keep pace with what is going on in healthcare procurement and purchasing jobs, you will want to develop and maintain your relationship with PurchasingCrossing.com so that you can find your ideal position and then continue networking with other professionals like yourself.
