Derwood Dunbar Jr.

Since mid-1989 Derwood Dunbar Jr. has led one of the top 12 largest GPOs in the nation – Mechanicsburg, PA-based Mid-Atlantic Group Network of Shared Services (MAGNET), a group of groups, per se, that was partly the brainchild of Dunbar and consultant Bill McFaul. Over the years, while other GPOs focused on medical/surgical, laboratory, pharmaceutical and food service supplies, MAGNET has concentrated more heavily in asset management, building a specialized, and arguably the most extensive portfolio of capital equipment and service contracts. What you may not know is that Dunbar is one of the last remaining, if not only remaining GPO chief executive with a hospital materials management background. During much of the 1960s through the late 1970s he served as purchasing director for three different hospitals in the Chicagoland metropolitan area before moving to Pennsylvania to enter the burgeoning field of group purchasing and shared services. But he developed his considerable asset management expertise in the hospital environment, exploring new ways to acquire capital equipment cost effectively for his respective facilities.

When three different religious-oriented healthcare systems in St. Louis merged to form BJC Health System in 1992, Jim Francis was tapped to be BJC’s vice president of materiel services to pull everything together. Francis, who had been part of forerunner organization Christian Health Services since 1984 and had risen through the ranks to vice president of corporate services, had his work cut out for him to develop, hone, streamline and unite disparate materials management operations, including GPO affiliations, vendor contracts and IT systems. It was one of those "you want me to do what?" projects that either makes or breaks a skilled and talented manager. Francis, however, rolled up his sleeves, dug his feet into the ground and delivered, earning HPN’s Materials Manager of the Year Award in 1994. Francis initiated performance improvement teams to explore how to work with clinicians and administrators to standardize products and significantly reduce the number of vendors they used, including GPOs. BJC’s three heritage organizations each belonged to one of the three largest groups at the time but they ultimately chose VHA. Then they signed a broad distribution agreement with Baxter Healthcare Corp. instead of the VHA authorized distributor for "the ability to pursue some strategies on our own." Francis spent most of the 1990s shaping BJC’s supply chain that could have resulted in a lucrative consulting career and fame on the speaking circuit. Instead, Francis left BJC in 1999 for an even more unusual challenge – leading supply expense management efforts at the physician-driven Mayo Foundation. At Mayo, Francis was able to diplomatically and tactfully influence the clinicians to be more bottom-line focused, standardizing on functionally equivalent products without compromising quality of care. While his efforts generated success for Mayo Foundation facilities, it also has left him with a little more gray hair.

Nick Gaich

If there’s any way to describe Nick Gaich’s whirlwind career at Stanford (CA) University Hospitals and Clinics then roller coaster might fit the bill. Seven years ago, his organization faced some fiscal dire straits. Not only was it operating in the red but it had to rebound from a costly, painful and short-lived merger with another organization farther up the coast of California. Rather than jump ship, Gaich dug in his heels and proved his mettle, elevating materials management to a respectable place in the boardroom as a strategic contributor to Stanford’s financial turnaround. By working closely with physicians and gaining their trust, as well as reengineering his department’s functions along service lines, he helped to redefine supply chain management moving forward. Before moving on to a new role within the organization centered on clinical trials and research his title was a mouthful: Vice president of customer service and materials management programs and service line administrator for functional restoration. These days he serves as COO of the Stanford/Packard Center for Translation Research in Medicine, translating his business acumen even more closely to clinical success.

John Gaida

Ask John Gaida what he believes history will remember about him and he’ll likely ignore his storied career in hospital supply chain management and consulting, along with a brief foray into the dot-com world. Instead, he’ll focus on the one aspect of his career that means the most to him: Mentoring. Sure, he ran successful supply chain management programs in Berkeley, CA, and Boston at such organizations as Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Partners Healthcare System Inc., which included the vaunted Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, moved into senior-level consulting work with BD after the manufacturer acquired Tom Hughes’ Concepts In Healthcare firm, jumped into the online fray for a short time and then returned full circle to be the primary supply chain executive at multi-hospital system Texas Health Resources. The leadership award-winning past president of AHRMM may have organizations and recruiters pursuing him when top management positions open up, but he remains content keeping THR fiscally responsible and efficiently under control, as well as watching the materials managers he’s coached and mentored over the years develop their careers and contribute to the profession’s progress.

As a materials management speaker, thought leader and prolific HPN columnist in the 1980s Ned Gerber, CPA, could draw crowds at association meetings not from his bookworm appearance but through his respected words of wisdom. Gerber channeled his materials management background at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital into a long-standing consulting gig at Coopers & Lybrand where he served as their resident healthcare supply chain guru for much of the decade. But in addition to his acute talent for supply chain management, Gerber was a deeply religious man who served as a monk in the Order of St. Benedict at the Chicago Priory of Christ the King, along with his brother Kirt. Driven by his faith and ministry, Br. Gerber traveled to Sydney, Australia, as a Benedictine Brother in the Anglican church. While he followed his religious calling he also didn’t stray far from his industry specialty, continuing to consult and lecture on such topics as healthcare supply chain best practices as the director of health/pharma consulting for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Many may recognize the late George Gossett’s name simply because it’s the branding affixed to AHRMM’s annual Leadership Award, which has been bestowed 26 times in AHRMM’s 45-year history as a personal membership group within the American Hospital Association. (Technically, AHRMM began in 1951 as a personal membership department within the AHA, which reorganized the departments 11 years later into societies giving them the right to elect a president.) Gossett served as AHRMM’s first president in 1962-1963. Back then the association was known as the American Society for Hospital Purchasing Agents. Gossett held purchasing positions at the Poly Clinic, Cleveland, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and Mercy Hospital, Pittsburgh, where he also became involved with the Hospital Bureau and the Hospital Council of Western Pennsylvania. Certainly as the inaugural president of a "new" industry society cemented Gossett as a trend-setter of sorts because he was establishing the bar against which his successors would measure. But Gossett believed the function and position of purchasing and materials management was destined for greatness and prominence in hospitals, an idea that germinated for more than 30 years and finally is being acknowledged in the C-suites within the last decade. Gossett promoted the need for education and professional development as a way to cultivate industry leaders.

Devoted fans and disciples call Charles Housley the father of modern healthcare materiel management (notice the spelling of materiel, which Housley emphasized in trademark fashion) and it’s easy to see why. During a hospital career that grew in the late 1960s, flourished in the 1970s and peaked in the late 1980s, Housley redefined and reenergized the profession, establishing a benchmark that would take center stage in the managed care-directed decade that followed. He wrote 15 authoritative books on healthcare supply chain management strategies, tactics and techniques that served as effective companions (and arguably rivals) to Ammer’s tomes on materials managers’ bookshelves, edited prominent industry publications and was a frequent and popular draw on the lecture circuit. Most noteworthy is that Housley developed and nurtured his reputation as a trail blazer and visionary largely at one hospital where he spent more than 20 years of his career, starting as an administrative resident and earning his stripes as associate administrator of materiel management. He helped pioneer the concept of just-in-time and stockless distribution agreements (thanks in part to his distributor maintaining a warehouse across the street) using exchange carts, PAR levels and case carts, retooled the concept of product evaluation and standardization and emphasized the need for product formularies. Housley firmly and strongly advocated that materials management should represent a strong force in a hospital and be led by a senior-level executive. Another noteworthy accomplishment: He was one of a small but elite group of materials managers who became a hospital president and CEO. Today, he continues to soldier on, but largely under the radar by choice, as CEO of Appalachian Regional Medical Center, Hazard, KY.

Thomas Hughes

Best known for his consulting career in the firm he founded, Concepts In Healthcare Inc., Tom Hughes cultivated his reputation and mastered his trade as the primary materials management executive at such prominent hospitals as Tufts New England Medical Center and Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. At Concepts he took his experience on the road, sharing his supply chain management expertise with thousands of hospitals across the nation through numerous educational seminars and individual contracting deals. He became a stalwart promoter of value analysis, activity-based costing and cultivating physician relationships for a facility’s ongoing fiscal health. When he sold Concepts to Becton Dickinson and Co. in 1998, he envisioned the twilight of a successful career and a long, drawn-out countdown to eventual retirement. He came close. That is until a startup organization, Strategic Marketplace Initiative, recruited him to be its executive director in 2005 where he remains directing an activist organization dedicated to creating, developing and implementing best practices in supply chain management.

In 1985, Frank Kilzer did the unthinkable – and something many hospitals still haven’t done more than 20 years later. With his (now retired) CEO’s blessing he purchased the first bar-code technology system designed for healthcare applications. St. Alexius Medical Center, Bismarck, ND, spent $50,000 for the "bleeding edge" technology and two years trying to make it work effectively for their needs. It was a dismal failure. So Kilzer replaced it with some internally designed software to scan bar codes on all medications and supplies…in 1987. Six years later, St. Alexius installed computers equipped with bar code scanners in patient rooms to track medication and supply consumption at the bedside. Such a strategy became a critical component of the model for an efficient supply chain of the future now facilitated by Internet-based and wireless technology. Since the mid-1980s, Kilzer has been a tireless evangelist for point-of-use bar coding and is widely regarded as a pioneer in bar coding practices for healthcare supply chain management. He also cultivated a strong professional relationship with and mutual respect of his organization’s CEO, elevating the department to executive-level status as a direct report to the C-suite. Kilzer serves as vice president of material and facility resources.

Jamie Kowalski

For the bulk of the 1970s, Jamie Kowalski honed his materials management skills by running the departments at four different hospitals, each incidentally a new or replacement facility, located in southeastern Wisconsin and Nashville, TN. During that time he implemented computerized information systems, including one of the industry’s first per-diem supply charge system, and developed product evaluation and standardization processes. He interrupted his hospital career with a brief year with a national supplier. In 1981, he launched an independent healthcare supply chain-focused consulting company that bore his name for more than two decades, even when a national GPO acquired it and then sold it to a management outsourcing services firm. In 2004, McKesson Provider Technologies recruited him to run their new supply chain, surgical services and revenue cycle consulting business unit within the distributor’s IT division, but he realized the fit wasn’t right. So last year he joined distributor Owens & Minor Inc. to head up business development in the area of supply chain management. A prolific author of industry textbooks and trade magazine articles, Kowalski has promoted strategic planning, performance measurement, automation and IT implementation, as well as advanced and self-contracting and distribution models within supply chain management.

Nancy LeMaster

As a data-savvy materials management executive Nancy LeMaster took an unusual road into the industry. With the oil and gas industry tanking economically in the mid-1980s the Houston-educated and newly minted MBA graduate settled on healthcare by default. After spending several years in strategic planning and marketing at Houston’s Hermann Hospital, LeMaster migrated north to Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, prior to the 1992 formation of one of the more innovative integrated delivery networks (IDNs) in the nation – BJC HealthCare. The IDN’s management team recruited LeMaster to launch a multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted performance improvement project to evaluate best practices, cost reductions and policy and product standardization to promote the merger. After working successfully with materials management during much of the 1990s, LeMaster assumed the office of vice president of materials services in 1999, realigning and redesigning the department under logistics functions and strategy functions, which included contract management. Like her predecessor, LeMaster tends to sidestep the party line, particularly when it involves GPO, distributor and dot-com choices, opting to do what she considers competitive, innovative and optimal for BJC. Her focused grasp of numbers, process details and mechanics, as well as support for supply chain IT are legendary while keeping the big picture sharply in focus, too. LeMaster’s efforts at best pushed materials management’s influence into the C-suite.

Michael Louviere

With a background rooted in pharmacy, a profession revered for its inventory management practices, Michael Louviere should understand what it takes to run an efficient supply chain management operation. And he’s demonstrated that proficiency in creative and innovative ways wherever he has worked in his career – from senior-level supply chain management positions in hospitals and IDNs to a clinical services executive position for a national oncology center operator. As the vice president of materials management for healthcare industry heavyweight and trendsetter Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., Nashville, TN, in the mid-1990s, Louviere wielded a lot of clout and influence based on facility commitment and volume. While it seemed as though Columbia/HCA drove compliance by standardization unilaterally if you peeled back the curtain you found that Louviere and his team conducted extensive work with clinical end users, gleaning their input and earning their support before negotiating blockbuster supply deals. His career seemed to peak at Columbia/HCA, which appointed him CEO of one of its Louisville hospitals for barely a year as the company began to suffer under a black cloud of fiscal problems. He resurfaced leading the resource management department for Baptist Memorial Healthcare System, Memphis, TN, at the turn of the millennium, then moved to U.S. Oncology before becoming vice president, supply chain, at Baptist Health System, Birmingham, in 2004. Baptist’s serious financial challenges motivated Louviere to lead the turnaround charge by redesigning and reinvigorating supply chain operations at the IDN and reaching out to clinicians in an award-winning effort that contributed to the organization swinging back to the black.

What Carl Manley lacks in physical height and size he more than makes up for it in spirit and stature. As the vice president of materials management at Norfolk, VA-based Sentara Healthcare, one of the earliest and more successful IDN models to emerge in the 1990s he developed an internal distribution system and a consolidated distribution center, making it operational and cost effective when most IDNs were in the exploratory stage. Manley pursues high-level strategic planning for supply chain management as much as he rolls up his sleeves and works in the trenches with his employees. He was one of the principal architects behind the Strategic Marketplace Initiative, which was formed to examine critical issues and potential deficiencies in the supply chain and design and implement tangible and workable solutions.

The late Lillian Matiska certainly was a woman ahead of the times as director of purchasing at Jeanette (PA) Memorial Hospital. As AHRMM’s 12th president in 1973-1974, and the association’s second consecutive woman president, she helped to soften the gender boundaries in the male-dominated profession. Her gentle influence, but passion for education and mentoring, helped at least one other person on this list and contributed to her earning AHRMM’s leadership award in 1980.

William McFaul

Few may realize that prominent healthcare expense management consultant Bill McFaul came by his notable expertise the old fashioned way – as a purchasing clerk/internal auditor for the laboratory at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital in the late 1960s, becoming assistant director of purchasing for the facility by 1971. Helping the regional GPO Joint Purchasing Corp. (now JPC) develop some new contracting programs exposed him to group purchasing and shared services, experience he would keep in the back of his mind as he moved to a New Jersey hospital as purchasing director in 1973. But that job was short-lived as a local shared services organization for several hospitals recruited him to be its director. He grew the company to 16 facilities and began touting the idea of a "supergroup" of multiple GPOs on the speaking circuit. That led to the development of Mid-Atlantic Group Network of Shared Services (MAGNET). By 1980, he and Diana Lyons, a clinical nurse he had hired to help him better understand clinical practices within the shared services company he ran, formed McFaul & Lyons Inc. as a consulting firm that would help hospitals control expenses and streamline operations. The firm gained national renown for promoting such innovative concepts as data sharing and product standardization among multiple facilities. McFaul and his firm worked with hundreds of hospitals and conducted more than 150 educational seminars. Over time, though, the extensive travel schedule began to take its toll. McFaul and Lyons sold the firm to a division of Johnson & Johnson and McFaul retired. But his absence was short-lived. Within three years, he re-emerged on the healthcare scene, initially promoting some of the same issues as before but then moving beyond supply chain management to tackle some of the high-level issues disrupting the C-suite with a new venture called The Center for Modeling Optimal Outcomes and a sister firm called Strategic Initiatives in Healthcare.

A consummate professional throughout her entire career, Judith Newberry was a steadfast champion and supporter of materials management and group purchasing. She brought a CEO-level of sophistication to the profession, giving it a high level of visibility in the C-suite and in GPO circles. From her association work (she is a past president of the Health Care Material Management Society, which was absorbed by AHRMM several years ago) to her hospital experience at such facilities as the University of Missouri-Columbia Hospital and Clinics and most recently SwedishAmerican Health System, Rockford, IL, to her GPO influence at University HealthSystem Consortium, she contributed considerably to raising the bar for women in the profession.

Richard Perrin

As one of the leading advocates for information technology adoption and implementation in the supply chain, as well as industry-wide data standardization and synchronization you’d be hard-pressed to attend a supply chain- or IT-related conference and not find him there as a featured speaker or simply speaking his mind. Perrin remains visually and vocally passionate about the need for supply chain IT to the point that the entire industry, thanks to heightened concerns about patient safety, fiscal transparency and cost management being spurred by government interest, finally may be catching up to him. Perrin plied his skills early on as director of materials management at the esteemed Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston before he moved on to healthcare consulting work and educational experience as a faculty member for management information systems at Northeastern University where Dean Ammer also served. His IT experience spans a variety of applications ranging from mainframe-based multi-hospital environments to distributed data processing systems involving the use of mini- and micro-computers, including bar codes and relational data bases. A past president of HCMMS who also is active with AHRMM, HFMA and HIMSS as a thought leader in the IT association’s supply chain management group, Perrin and his supply chain consulting firm (first Healthcare Concepts Inc., then AdvanTech Inc.) specialize in IT across the enterprise, productivity improvement and value analysis, among others. Perrin also played a key role in the consolidation progression of Catholic-sponsored group purchasing during the 1990s, working with the forerunner organizations of Consorta Inc.

Paul Powell was a dominant presence in the investor-owned hospital community during the 1970s and 1980s – first with Hospital Corporation of America and then with rival Humana Inc. as vice president of purchasing. Powell is credited, along with Gene Burton, for shaping HCA’s and Humana’s contracting and purchasing programs, positioning the chains to become a trend-setting force in group purchasing, which they did in the 1990s following their merger into Columbia/HCA. Regarded by some as fearless in his negotiating, Powell exemplified the business professionalism of materials management.

John Strong

John Strong is familiar with making tough, career-changing decisions, the most recent of which involved signing the GPO he led and helped develop since 1998 as an affiliate of HealthTrust Purchasing Group earlier this year. Consorta Inc.’s debut nine years ago emerged from a long-running debate about the feasibility and need for a national organization to represent Catholic-sponsored and religious-oriented facilities, culminating in a monumental decision to merge supply chain operations for a dozen Catholic-sponsored GPOs. Strong, who had helped to create Premier Inc. with Lynn Detlor a decade ago, left to spend a year consulting with Tom Hughes before Consorta recruited him as its chief. Regarded for his high personal and professional ethical standards, forward-thinking strategies and thorough deliberations on business decisions, Strong’s quiet strength and unassuming demeanor shrouded his leadership qualities, making him the ideal choice to run Consorta. Like Derwood Dunbar Jr., Strong was another GPO CEO who rose through the ranks of hospital materials management. He spent his early career in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Lutheran General Hospital System, Park Ridge, IL. There he headed materials management operations for the system through a subsidiary company called Parkside Associates. In the mid-1980s, Strong established a hospital-backed joint venture, teaming Parkside with local distributor Harris Hospital Supply, Broadview, IL, to form Health Care Materials. As HCM president, Strong wanted to distribute products and offer outsourced materials management services starting with Lutheran and branching out to the metro Chicago area and ultimately to several states. With interest in just-in-time distribution growing and stockless arrangements peaking in the late 1980s and clinicians resistant to changing their buying habits, HCM lasted only five years. Strong then moved to Premier Health Alliance, one of the forerunner organizations of Premier Inc., as vice president of materials management in the early to mid-1990s.

With a career that has spanned materials management operations in hospitals and complex healthcare systems, involving large-scale projects, as well as a term in healthcare supply chain management consulting, Peggy Styer can strategize effectively from an ivory tower but also jump into the trenches to implement strong and successful cost management programs. She currently is one of the driving forces streamlining processes and reducing costs at Catholic Healthcare West as the director of supply chain management/operations. Her current hurdle involves implementing an ERP module system-wide among 42 CHW hospitals, accounting for data standardization and synchronization. Styer’s inherent professionalism and calm demeanor represent unflappability under intense pressure.

As the director of purchasing at Wilmington (DE) Hospital, a large influential facility in the late 1970s and 1980s, Claude Trafas was a staunch and vocal advocate for centralizing the materials management function and operating like a real business on a "sound profit-and-loss basis." Trafas, an influential leader among Delaware facilities, most likely was influenced by the growing power of the investor-owned hospital chains and hospital management companies. Despite his preference for hospitals to maintain control of all of their supply chain operations, Trafas recognized the contributions and influence of the new breed of GPOs emerging at the time. He argued that once a hospital committed to joining a group it should avoid negotiating better deals on its own using the group price as a benchmark or be dropped from the group. At the same time he stressed that vendors not sell to group members at "other than group rates."

An outspoken lightning rod of a thought leader going back to the 1980s, Alex Vallas often opposed the prevailing wisdom that dominated the industry zeitgeist. To the casual observer, the often controversial director of materials management at Pittsburgh’s Magee-Womens Hospital may have come across as an industry curmudgeon. But that wasn’t the case. Like the Old Testament prophets predicting doom and gloom for Israelites because of their sin, Vallas decried the inclusion of consultants, which he viewed as vendors, and vendors being so intimately involved in industry associations. To some Vallas seemed old school and behind the times. But he simply was something of a purist who merely advocated a clear separation between providers and suppliers as the lone voice of reason in the wilderness. As prominent hospital materials managers joined the consulting, GPO and vendor community market delineations began to blur. At best, infusing the provider market with vendor blood and vice versa did affect the profession’s development, for better or worse, but arguably didn’t impede progress. Still, Vallas’ vocal encouragement of hospital materials managers doing things well on their own and discouragement blending the provider and supplier cultures too closely served as a useful reality check.

As director of materials management at the University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic in the late 1980s and early 1990s and later as system director of materials management at Fairview Health System, Minneapolis, Lou Vietti liked to push the envelope in terms of non-salary expense management and reduction. In an educational institution with so many clinicians and scientists with vested interests that can be a challenge. But Vietti was able to reach out to those clinicians, engage them in a value analysis process to standardize products and reduce inventory by the millions. Today, such strategies and tactics are commonplace – typically standard operating procedure. Two decades ago, however, they were more novel and potentially risky ventures. Vietti also was credited for his innovative development of a large-scale warehouse operation to manage supply flow for a variety of facilities.

A gregarious and popular thought leader in the 1970s and 1980s, the late president of American Hospital Supply Corp. (now part of Cardinal Health Inc. through a series of mergers) had a habit of disrupting the status quo and pushing the envelope. The groundbreaking exclusive distribution agreement Bays signed with Voluntary Hospitals of America (later VHA) in 1979 attracted federal heat on antitrust grounds and a lawsuit by four medical/surgical distributors. When Bays proposed merging American with Hospital Corporation of America in 1985, VHA chose to "phase out" of its contractual relationship with the distributor, citing HCA as a competitor. Bays’ motivation for an HCA merger? "The competition is causing consolidation, and the lines are getting blurry. We simply decided we wanted to set the pace." However, Baxter Travenol Laboratories outbid HCA and merged with American to form Baxter Healthcare Corp. Four years after the merger, Bays died in 1989. Within a few years, VHA warmed up to Baxter, due to member demands and market forces, and signed the company as an authorized distributor.

Robert "Bud" Bowen

Bud Bowen spent more than 35 years carefully building a career based on integrity and the conviction to conduct business in an ethical manner, culminating in his role as the second president – and first CEO – of Amerinet Inc., one of the nation’s largest GPOs, before his retirement last year. Bowen entered the healthcare arena with American Hospital Supply Corp., a leading distributor, where he learned fundamental healthcare materials management concepts and techniques. He then spent five years as director of purchasing and materials management at New England Management Corp., a long-term care management company that owned and operated six skilled nursing facilities. Haricomp Inc., the shared services company forerunner to Vector HealthSystems, recruited Bowen as its director of group purchasing, and he helped Haricomp grow into a strong regional player. In 1986, Bowen was instrumental in the formation and launch of Amerinet Inc., with Haricomp as one of four shareholders.

As vice president of purchasing at St. Louis-based Daughters of Charity National Health System during the late 1980s and 1990s, Jonah Hughes steered the supply chain activities of the largest Catholic-sponsored GPO in the nation. He became an influential thought leader whose career spanned 30 years before his retirement in 2002. Hughes helped to usher in Daughters of Charity’s expansion to Ascension Health Inc. in 1999 and was instrumental in the inking of a major distribution deal with Medline Industries where he later served as a consultant on diversity issues. Hughes began his career as a hospital purchasing director in New Jersey.

Armed with management engineering degrees and a brief stint at Procter & Gamble, Ben Latimer plied his skills at Methodist Hospital, Memphis, TN, in the mid-to-late 1960s to improve nursing operations with the help of computer technology and management information systems. Carolinas Hospital and Health Services Inc., founded in 1969 as the shared services arm of the North and South Carolina Hospital Associations, recruited Latimer to be its chief. Under Latimer’s direction, the company grew to become SunHealth Alliance, a leading regional GPO in the southeast. With member backing, Latimer merged SunHealth into Premier Inc. in late 1995 and oversaw the new organization’s performance improvement consulting business, in effect returning to his management engineering roots.

Larry and Sharon Malcolmson, the husband-and-wife team who co-founded MD Buyline in 1983 changed the way hospitals and other healthcare facilities evaluate and acquire capital equipment and information technology. Their goal was to "create a level playing field for hospitals and medical technology vendors, empowering members to make sound technology and financial decisions." Today, with its online database on medical capital equipment and IT, including evaluations, user feedback and vendor information, MD Buyline remains a competent and comprehensive tool for strategic sourcing.

Mark McKenna

Although he had a varied early career on the supplier side, Mark McKenna was most known for his experience at VHA Inc. and Novation. McKenna joined VHA in 1978 to manage the GPO’s medical/surgical contracting business, as well as spearhead its growing private-label program. As far back as the 1980s, McKenna became one of the early explorers into physician preference items and how a national GPO could tap into that market segment. McKenna was instrumental in the creation and development of Novation in 1998, the joint venture supply management company for VHA and University HealthSystem Consortium, where he served as president before his retirement last year.

Joel Nobel, M.D., may not be a household name on the healthcare supply chain circuit, but the organization he founded and actively managed until 2001 certainly is. While some have labeled it "Consumer Reports" for hospitals, ECRI, which rebranded itself as the ECRI Institute several months ago, stops short of the trademark hierarchical product and vendor rankings for which its consumer counterpart is best know. However, ECRI Institute’s comparison with Consumer Reports shouldn’t come as a surprise because Nobel has served as a board member of the Consumers Union since 1978. Yet, ECRI Institute’s formal program to evaluate competing brands and models of medical equipment and technology, including the testing laboratories and staff, was modeled after Consumer Reports back in 1970. Nobel either created or initiated many of the ECRI Institute’s programs in technology assessment, product evaluation, risk management and technical assistance services, including a wide variety of reliable publications, CD-ROM and online databases. One of his claims to fame is the 1968 creation and implementation of the Hospital Emergency Command System, which linked and mobilized all telecommunications, emergency equipment, elevators and pagers of key personnel during crisis response. Early in his career, during one year as a general surgical resident at Pennsylvania Hospital (the nation’s first hospital), he designed and developed MAX, a mobile emergency life-support and resuscitation system. His neurosurgical residency, however, at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, was interrupted by military service as a medical officer in the U.S. Navy. He served on a nuclear submarine and then in the Military Operations Branch of the Submarine Medical Research Laboratory. Following his naval service, Nobel devoted his career to full-time research, rather than as a practicing clinician. These days Nobel is developing ECRI Institute’s expansion in the Middle East and Asia.

A consummate entrepreneur with keen marketing savvy, Earl Norman parlayed his trucking and distribution business experience to the healthcare industry. Reportedly with $75 cash in a basement room, Norman launched Norman & Associates in 1969 and started calling on 10 hospitals. Known as a tough negotiator, he expanded the company into Mid-America Shared Services and after acquiring several regional purchasing groups outside of the Midwest he changed the company name to Health Services Corporation of America in 1984. HSCA became one of the first innovators in the concept of electronic order entry and one of the first GPOs to promote multi-source contracting. An early opponent of vendor-paid administrative fees, Norman changed his mind during HSCA’s short-lived experience as a founding shareholder in Amerinet. Norman sold HSCA to MedAssets in 2000.

As the founder, chairman and CEO of Enterprise Systems Inc. (ESI) Tom Pirelli channeled his appreciation for "Star Trek" into making healthcare management software necessary for cost reduction accessible and even fun for materials managers. At best, ESI was the Apple in a DOS-based world. Pirelli, who was more of the Captain Kirk-like business and marketing genius behind ESI, and his No. 2 guy Dave Carlson, (executive vice president and co-founder) who was the techy, Spock-like software developer, launched a concept and a suite of products beginning in 1981 into a popular and respected brand for 1980s and 1990s. Pirelli took the company public in 1995 and sold the firm to HBO & Co. in 1997. McKesson Corp. subsequently bought HBOC and rebranded the company as McKesson Provider Technologies. Pirelli launched a new venture in January 2001, ArialPhone Corp., which produced wireless earset communications devices and voice-enabling software applications.