ALL Solutions 
November 14, 2025
Purchased Services in Healthcare Why Clinical
Collaboration and Data Matter—and How
SupplyCopia Drives Savings
We at SupplyCopia researched how U.S. hospitals are managing purchased services—and the findings reveal both a major challenge and a massive opportunity.
Purchased services—everything from outsourced clinical contracts and IT to environmental, staffing, logistics, and facilities management—now represent one of the largest and least-controlled expense categories in healthcare. Hospitals are projected to spend over $50 billion on purchased services in 2025, making up 40–50% of non-labor costs across the country.
The Hidden Cost Crisis
While these services are essential to operations, inefficiencies are widespread. Invoices often exceed 50 pages, filled with unstandardized line items and paid without benchmarking or contract validation. As a result, 10–15% of total purchased services spend is wasted annually—billions of dollars across U.S. health systems.
Consider the scale:
- Environmental services will reach $18.57 billion in 2025, growing at 8.4% CAGR due to outsourcing and labor shortages.
- Clinical staffing purchased services rose 13% year-over-year, driven by workforce gaps.
- Medical costs overall continue to climb 5–7% each year, while non-labor categories such as IT services face 5.5% inflation in 2026.
At the same time, 56% of hospitals still report negative margins (AHA, 2025). The need for financial control has never been more urgent.
Why Overspending Persists
The problem isn’t intent—it’s structure. Most hospitals still operate in silos:
- Clinicians order services based on immediate needs, often without visibility into cost or contract terms.
- Supply chain teams negotiate with limited feedback on service quality or utilization.
- Finance departments see spending only after payment, often in bulk, with no standardized view of what’s driving costs.
This lack of shared data leads to duplicate contracts, off-contract purchases, and missed opportunities to consolidate or renegotiate. In many systems, it’s common to find five different vendors doing the same courier work for separate departments—simply because no one has a full view.
How SupplyCopia Solves It
SupplyCopia’s Purchased Services platform was built to fix this broken model. Using AI and advanced document intelligence, it digitizes and classifies every invoice line item—across clinical, facilities, IT, logistics, and administrative categories. What this delivers is full visibility and immediate clarity.
Here’s how it works:
- AI-Powered Invoice Intelligence: Every invoice is scanned, standardized, and mapped to its true cost center and service category—eliminating manual entry errors and data silos.
- Dynamic Benchmarking: Prices and service levels are benchmarked in real time against thousands of market data points. The system flags outlier pricing, duplicate spend, and non-compliant contracts instantly.
- Automated Compliance Monitoring: Off-contract charges, expired agreements, missed rebates, and hidden fees are surfaced automatically—driving up to 83% improvement in contract compliance.
- Collaborative AI Assistant – “Ask the BEE”: Clinicians, finance, and supply chain staff can ask targeted questions—about vendor performance, utilization, or cost trends—and get instant, data-backed answers.
Quantifiable Results
Hospitals using SupplyCopia typically realize:
- 10–15% annual savings on purchased services—equal to $8–12 million per health system per year.
- Faster processing, with invoices reviewed in hours instead of weeks.
- Accurate, unified visibility across every department’s spend and vendor network.
- Stronger clinical satisfaction, since frontline teams gain a voice in vendor evaluation and service quality tracking.
In one major U.S. IDN, SupplyCopia’s implementation uncovered three times more purchased services spend than initially recorded, enabling contract consolidation across over 1,000 categories and savings exceeding 20%.
The Strategic Advantage
By breaking down silos, SupplyCopia enables true collaboration among clinical, supply chain, and finance teams. Everyone operates from the same data, sees the same metrics, and pursues the same goal: reducing waste while maintaining care quality.
For clinicians, that means understanding the real cost and impact of every outsourced service.
For supply chain leaders, it means evidence-based negotiations and fewer redundant vendors.
For finance, it means automated visibility, better forecasting, and cleaner audits.
The Bottom Line
Purchased services have become the last, largest, and fastest-growing controllable expense in healthcare. Inflation, labor shortages, and outsourcing are pushing costs higher each year—but hospitals now have the tools to respond with precision and speed.
SupplyCopia gives hospitals a data-driven foundation to manage this spend intelligently:
- Real market benchmarks, not estimates.
- Automated contract and compliance oversight.
- Transparent, shared dashboards for all departments.
- Measurable savings that protect margins and strengthen care delivery.
As the pressure on hospital finances intensifies, a unified, AI-powered approach isn’t optional—it’s essential. SupplyCopia is that bridge between insight and action, turning data into savings and collaboration into measurable results
More from SupplyCopia
