A 90-Day Perspective from SpendMend CEO Trey Cook
Three months ago, I wrote about why I joined SpendMend and why I believed the company had reached an important moment in its history.
After spending my first 90 days listening to clients, meeting with healthcare leaders, and learning from our teams, I would amend one part of what I wrote.
SpendMend’s mission is not merely important.
It is urgent!
Healthcare organizations are under extraordinary pressure. Reimbursement challenges continue to intensify. Labor and supply costs remain elevated. Regulatory requirements are becoming more complex. Technology investments are increasingly necessary and expensive. At the same time, health systems are being asked to expand access, improve outcomes, support their workforce, and meet the growing needs of their communities.
The mission remains unchanged: deliver exceptional patient care.
But the financial and operational environment surrounding that mission has become considerably more difficult.
Margin pressure is not an abstract business problem. It affects a health system’s ability to invest in technology, modernize facilities, retain talented people, expand services, and care for the communities that depend on it.
Every dollar matters because of what that dollar makes possible.
What I Have Heard
I began my time at SpendMend by listening, and that has continued throughout my first three months.
My conversations with clients, partners, healthcare executives, and employees have reinforced many of my earliest impressions. They have also given me a deeper appreciation for the complexity healthcare leaders manage every day.
Most are not lacking information. They are surrounded by it.
They have dashboards, reports, benchmarks, analytics, contracts, invoices, purchasing data, utilization data, and an expanding collection of technology platforms. Artificial intelligence is introducing another enormous source of potential insight.
The problem is not simply getting more data.
The problem is connecting it, understanding what matters, and turning that understanding into action.
Critical information is often scattered across departments, systems, contracts, and thousands of individual transactions. Finance may see one part of the picture. Supply chain sees another. Pharmacy and clinical leaders see others. Each team is working hard, but the complete picture remains difficult to assemble.
As a result, meaningful financial opportunities remain hidden in plain sight.
These opportunities are not missed because healthcare leaders are inattentive. They are missed because the environment has become extraordinarily difficult to see and manage.
The Importance of Visibility
For more than 30 years, SpendMend has been built around a simple but powerful idea: healthcare organizations deserve better visibility into their financial operations and greater confidence in the decisions they make.
That idea is even more relevant today.
SpendMend has developed deep expertise across several highly specialized areas of the healthcare cost cycle. We help organizations recover dollars they have already earned, prevent unnecessary costs, improve pharmacy procurement, manage complex rebate programs, strengthen 340B compliance, optimize purchased services, and recover value from medical equipment and other assets.
Each capability addresses a distinct challenge and delivers measurable value. But one of my most important observations from these first 90 days is how interconnected these challenges have become.
A pricing discrepancy may appear to be an accounts payable issue, but its cause may be found in a contract, a purchasing process, or an operational decision elsewhere in the organization. A rebate opportunity may be shaped by procurement behavior, utilization patterns, or incomplete data. An underused piece of medical equipment may reveal a broader opportunity involving capital planning, redeployment, or purchasing discipline.
The individual transaction matters. So does the larger pattern behind it.
Historically, many clients have known SpendMend for one highly effective solution. Our opportunity is to connect those capabilities and give healthcare leaders broader visibility across the entire cost cycle.
Not simply to show them what happened, but to help them understand why it happened, what it means, and what they should do next.
Technology Is Essential. People Make It Valuable.
Technology will play a defining role in healthcare’s future. Data science, automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence are creating powerful new ways to identify patterns and surface opportunities.
But technology alone is not the answer.
Healthcare does not need another vendor that identifies a problem, presents it on a dashboard, and leaves the client to determine what to do next.
The real value comes from combining technology with experience, judgment, and execution.
The best technology does more than reveal an opportunity. It helps people act on it and make better decisions as part of their everyday work. Trulla procurement is one example. By giving pharmacy buyers visibility into pricing, availability, preferred products, and approved suppliers at the time of purchase, Trulla helps them consistently make informed purchasing decisions across the organization.
That is how technology turns insight into sustained improvement. Instead of identifying a single savings opportunity, it helps create a better way of working that delivers value over time.
Our employees are equally important. They help clients understand the data, validate opportunities, put solutions into practice, and capture the value. They understand the information, but they also understand the operational realities behind it. They recognize that solutions must be practical, defensible, and align with the organization’s broader priorities.
Again and again, clients have described SpendMend as an extension of their team. They value our expertise and results, but they also value how we work. We listen. We remain engaged. We adapt our approach to the organization. We stay involved after an opportunity has been identified.
The goal is not simply to produce more information. The goal is to turn insight into action and create measurable financial and operational improvement that lasts.
From Important to Urgent
When I joined SpendMend, I believed the company was well positioned for its next phase of growth.
I believe that even more strongly today.
Not because the challenges facing healthcare are becoming easier. They are becoming more complex, more interconnected, and more consequential.
Our opportunity is to bring together proven solutions, specialized expertise, connected data, and modern technology to help healthcare organizations see more clearly across the cost cycle. It is to help clients recover what is owed, protect what they have, improve how resources are used, and make more informed decisions about what comes next.
Ultimately, this work is about more than financial performance.
It is about helping healthcare organizations preserve their resources they need to fulfill their mission.
Ninety days ago, I believed that was important work.
Today, I understand that it is urgent.
That is why SpendMend.
And that is why now.