COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS
CNECT: The Group Purchasing Organization You Deserve
More than 30 million people rely on you.
More than 881 health centers rely on us.
Every year, more than 30 million people rely on health centers for affordable, accessible care. But rising costs, shrinking margins, and labor shortages are making it harder for health centers to support their growing number of patients.
As these challenges mount, health centers are looking for solutions — that's where we come in.
For more than 40 years, CNECT has been a trusted partner to community health centers; supporting the movement and the ongoing fight to achieve health equity. Our solutions are built specifically to address the difficulties health centers face.
CNECT: What We Do for Our Members
At the root of all group purchasing organizations is the ability to help their members save.
In FY23, our community health center members saved more than $54 million by purchasing through CNECT. One health center alone saved $475K — imagine what you could do with that money?
It's through the diversity of our contract portfolio and the depth of our discounts that our members are able to achieve such impactful savings. CNECT's portfolio covers 3,500 contracts with 1,400 suppliers, giving our members access to reduced prices on more than 2.7 million products and services.
As we often say, through CNECT, you can access discounts on everything you need to build a new health center from the ground up.
FY23: CNECT Members Saved Millions of Dollars Savings at Every Stage for Your Health Center
Saving money is critical to our members, but it’s not the only benefit they enjoy from partnering with CNECT.
As burnout and staffing shortages have impacted health centers, our members have relied on us for operational support that reduces their workload. While we’ve been managing their contracts and rosters, resolving price load issues, ensuring end-to-end compliance, and proactively identifying savings opportunities, our members have been doing what they do best — helping patients and their communities.
Joining a GPO: What a GPO Is and Addressing Common Concerns
Group purchasing organizations (GPOs) use the collective purchasing power of their members to negotiate reduced prices with suppliers. Their members then have access to these discounted rates, so they can purchase the same products and services they did before joining the GPO while spending less money.
What Is a Group Purchasing Organization?
Joining a group purchasing organization provides a variety of benefits to community health centers and their staff. It does, however, involve an element of change, which can be daunting, especially in the healthcare industry, where quality and reliability are paramount.
Over the years, CNECT has partnered with thousands of organizations. During this time, we’ve listened to the concerns and reservations they and their staff have had about introducing a GPO to their organization. In our experience, these concerns are natural but unnecessary. After all, a good group purchasing organization makes its members’ lives easier, not harder.
We’ve put together an article that addresses some of the common concerns we’ve encountered. Whether you have reservations yourself, or you need to secure buy-in from apprehensive staff, this article explains why joining a GPO should be a source of excitement, not worry.
40+ Years of Supporting Community Health Centers
Supporting community health centers is something we’ve been doing for more than four decades.
In 1979, 14 years after the first health center opened, our predecessors at Health Center Partners (HCP) recognized the industry was facing funding challenges. Their response was to form CNECT, or Council of Community Clinics Service Corp as we were called back then. We were the first group purchasing organization built solely to meet the needs of community health centers.
Although our name has changed and we have welcomed members from other healthcare organizations, our commitment to community health centers and the critical work they do has never wavered.
We still have extremely close links to HCP — our parent company — and our entire family of companies, all of which provide support services to community health centers.
Central to the work of HCP is advocacy. In fact, one of the reasons CNECT was formed as a for-profit enterprise was to help HCP achieve more through their advocacy. Alongside the CNECT government affairs team, they work tirelessly with the United States Congress to achieve policy changes and results favorable to health centers and the safety-net population.
We’re extremely proud that, to this day, the revenue we generate is shared with HCP to fuel their advocacy, so our health center members know that we’re in their corner, fighting to enhance their ability to serve their patients.
Get More Information About CNECT
CNECT is proud to support hundreds of community health centers and to be an ambassador for the health center movement.
If you’d like to find out more about anything featured on this page — from our family of companies to the diversity of our portfolio — fill out the form below!
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