Life at The Resource Group | Intern Group Projects

By Noelle Harsley & Samantha Luna

Throughout the summer, The Resource Group's interns all participate in a group project. This year, there were six intern group projects including: Generic Pharmaceuticals Dashboard Development, Integrated Participant Item Master Management Group Project Overview, Reprocessing Resource Development, Services and Facilities Customer Facing Template, Sustainability Education Series Development, and Third Party Landing Page. These group projects not only provide an opportunity for collaboration but also support The Resource Group's overall business objective. Learn more about these group project and their lasting impacts below!

Generic Pharmaceuticals Dashboard Development

Project Lead: Nick Criswell, Lauren Himmelberg
Project Mentor: Shazia Nooruddin
Project Team: Cole Bramblett, Malek Agha, Matthew Dahl, Leo John

Each pharmacy distributor offers an internal generics program to their customers. Since we recently transitioned to a different pharmacy distributor, there was opportunity to find a proactive way to monitor the generics portfolio and corresponding pricing. Through this project, interns helped analyze current pricing compared to historical and contract pricing.

Project Goals
  • Develop a method to isolate spend and benchmark pricing against industry and internal metrics
  • Combine data from multiple sources into a single cohesive dataset in Google BigQuery
  • Highlight top opportunities in Tableau dashboard
Project Milestones
  • Get current pricing for all pharmaceutical products
  • Calculate and compare with current WAC pricing, historical pricing, and contract pricing
  • Automate replicable code that depicts impact of current pricing and flags top opportunities
Learning Outcomes
  • Communication
  • Project management
  • Pharmaceutical distribution knowledge
  • Utilizing Tableau

Integrated Participant Item Master Management Group

Project Leads: Mike Keschl, Andy Kilkenny
Project Mentor: Andy Kilkenny
Project Members: Elysia Addison, Ethan Jagnandan, Luc Chapall, Zoey (Yiwen) Niu

This project provided an opportunity for interns to create a scalable service framework from the ground up, including a detailed execution plan, pricing structure, and delivery model for a new value-add service. This initiative aligns with our goal to enhance financial performance and data integrity for our participants.

Project Goals
  • Design a comprehensive Item Master cleanup service model tailored to the unique needs of Integrated Participants
  • Evaluate and compare one-time cleanup offering versus an ongoing support model
  • Identify the teams, tools, estimated labor hours, and pricing structures required to operationalize and scale the service
Project Milestones
  • Benchmark current state and perform market research
  • Build service models (one-time and ongoing maintenance)
  • Draft deliverables and gather feedback from mentors
Learning Outcomes
  • Communication and stakeholder alignment
  • Exposure to supply chain operations and item master data
  • Strategic service design and business modeling

Reprocessing Resource Development

Project Lead: Tami Foucault, Tom Kalla
Project Mentor: Maddy Barsanti
Project Members: Alex Strong, Kelley Denny, Vivian Vo, Steven Ice

Reprocessing provides environmental stewardship opportunities to minimize waste in landfills and help provide reduced healthcare costs. The focus of this project was for interns to learn Ascension's reprocessing program and help create a detailed reprocessing playbook to serve as an educational resource for new and current associates.

Project Goals
  • Collaborate with current reprocessing vendor and internal reprocessing initiative team
  • Identify components of reprocessing program
  • Design a comprehensive program playbook for associate use
Project Milestones
  • Meet with key contacts to understand program and current resources
  • Identify key program topics and content
  • Draft playbook and present materials for associate use
Learning Outcomes
  • Project management
  • Reprocessing knowledge
  • Utilizing Tableau

Services and Facilities Outward Facing Template

Project Leads: Nicole Martin, Ryan Nelson
Project Mentor: Jess Staton
Project Members: Amali Corral, Austin Gregory, Chloe Hill, Rodell Andrews III

Part of onboarding new participants includes coordinating details related to administrative feeds, savings, cost avoidance, and risk mitigation. The goal of this project was to develop a template that would summarize Purchased Services and Facilities category detail to supplement and streamline the onboarding of new Resource Group participants.

Project Goals
  • Development of a purchased services and facilities category template for participant use
  • Facilitate the completion of this template for ~15 categories 
Project Milestones
  • Obtain all contract details for template creation
  • Draft template and receive approval from Communications and Legal teams
  • Present to national Contract Design Community
Learning Outcomes
  • Communication
  • Project management
  • Agreement interpretation

Sustainability Education Series Development

Project Lead: Tom Kalla
Project Mentor: Megan Schultz
Project Members: Dakota Pillera, Emma O'Brien, Lauren Dominguez, Tiana Weatherspoon

Environmental sustainability is a key focus across The Resource Group. This project focuses on building an environmental sustainability education program tailored to healthcare supply chain associates to increase awareness, understanding, and action toward environmentally responsible supply chain practices.

Project Goals
  • Conduct research to identify high-priority sustainability topics for healthcare supply chain
  • Design clear, actionable, educational pilot learning module for the organization
Project Milestones
  • Create education content and pilot module for testing
  • Provide recommendations for scaling and integrating the education program
  • Develop short evaluation to gather feedback
Learning Outcomes
  • Communication and stakeholder engagement
  • Environmental sustainability knowledge
  • Project management

Third Party Landing Page

Project Lead: Damon Gemes
Project Mentor: Jacque Alexander
Project Members: Dyani Fuhriman, Ryan Roberson, Steven Bleck

This project supports the development of a landing page on the Ascension website that will provide the contacts for contracting and responses to third party vendor contracting questions. The landing page will serve as a resource to improve customer service and increase efficiency.

Project Goals
  • Reduce communication traffic currently experienced by contracting teams
  • Route questions to appropriate resources and key contacts
  • Provide one location for all third party vendor contracting inquiries
Project Milestones
  • Perform preliminary research for landing page
  • Research answers for frequently asked questions
  • Collaborate with Integration Managers to roll out the landing page
Learning Outcomes
  • Communication
  • Project management
  • Stakeholder engagement