Value analysis committees, also called value analysis teams (VATs), manage medical and surgical products used within hospitals and IDNs. These products include commodities, supplies, and physician preference items. VACs do this by reviewing products’ clinical, financial, and operational data, to ensure the organization makes informed purchasing decisions.

VACs have been around for decades, and their roles, listed to the right, have largely remained the same. However, evolving organizational priorities have given VACs new goals associated with these well-established functions. Today, VACs consider an increasingly wide range of metrics to determine product value, manage standardization efforts for ever-expanding systems, and proactively ensure compliance.

VACs consist of clinical and administrative stakeholders including (but not limited to) supply chain reps, operating room managers, clinical leaders, service line leaders, finance reps, and clinicians to ensure that they carefully evaluate all aspects of each product. Organizations often have multiple VACs, each of which evaluates a category of products (such as surgical supplies) or products used within a single service line (such as cardiovascular).

Products that have VAC approval are more easily accessible to clinicians, and therefore more widely used. Moreover, VACs influence product use by meeting with clinicians to actively encourage use of approved products.

VACs are also often involved in organization-wide efforts to control costs, improve quality, or reduce unnecessary care variation. IDNs leverage VACs in such initiatives because they can adjust their evaluation criteria to favor products that help the organization succeed on these goals. For example, a VAC may place a greater weight on product spend, certain outcome metrics, or the number of products used for similar purposes depending on goals passed down to them by health system leaders.

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