.svg){kind=icon}
A National Healthcare System at Scale
SSM Health is a $10.5 billion Catholic non-profit healthcare system in the Midwest, with 23 hospitals across four states and nearly 40,000 employees. A 20-person procurement team manages more than 4,500 contracts and hundreds of new requests every month.
The Visibility Gap in Procurement
The challenge: procurement was invisible. Before Levelpath, SSM Health’s procurement processes ran through emails and shared folder drives, where requesters would submit a request and then hear nothing until the contract was signed. They had no insight into what was happening behind the scenes—committee approvals, financial reviews, and clinical program sign‑offs—while the sourcing team spent its time chasing down information and sending manual status updates instead of focusing on strategic work.
“We really wanted a program where we could have that insight, have that flow, have the requesters be part of that process instead of just submitting a request and then hearing back once the contract was signed,” - Rachel Kegel, Director of Sourcing Operations at SSM Health
Leadership Perspective on Process Gaps
Mike McDonough, System Director for Sourcing and Vendor Management, saw the same challenges from a leadership perspective. Teams were still relying on email and a shared network drive to communicate and store contracts, which led to inconsistent practices and made it difficult for staff to find historical files or past requests in a single, reliable place.
Making Stakeholders a Part of the Proecess
SSM Health needed more than a new tool; they needed a single front door that could serve 40,000 employees across 23 hospitals and automatically route every request to the right person.
