Howard Medical is the independent distributor for the independent hospital. We give your team free tools that show exactly where your supply dollars go, then we find the items where you're overpaying and deliver the savings, with a report every month to prove it.
National distributors and GPOs build around big systems. Independent hospitals get the same contract and a fraction of the support.
Thousands of PO lines and no easy way to spot what changed. Price increases slip through because nobody has the time to catch them.
Most hospitals already have fair pricing on 85 to 90% of what they buy. The money is in the rest. Finding those items is what we do, and surgical supplies are usually the biggest win.
This is exactly what you'll see from us, shown with a sample hospital so you can click through every step.
You export 12 months of purchase orders from whatever system you use. It's usually thousands of lines with no easy way to see what's changed. That's normal. It's all we need.
Supply Guard is an AI assistant built on your own purchase history. It shows you vendor price increases over time, pricing that has drifted from contract, and where your spend is concentrated. You can just ask it questions.
We benchmark every item against the lowest price you paid in the last 90 days, so the savings are real, not inflated. Then we match each item exactly, or with a clinically approved equivalent that you and your clinicians sign off on. The items you choose go on a stock list with 30 days on hand in our warehouse.
Our guarantee. If we can't identify $100,000 in annualized savings within 72 hours, we donate $1,000 to your hospital's charity of choice.
Proposals are promises. The monthly report is proof. It shows what you actually bought from us, what you would have paid before, and the difference, line by line. It's the document you take to your CFO, every month.
Mark Litton, our CEO, walks through Supply Guard on real purchasing data. This is what your team gets in step two.
Both numbers come from the monthly reports these hospitals receive. Savings compare what they paid Howard with what they paid before for the same items.
Gloves, blood collection sets, Foley trays and pediatric car seats drove most of the year. The relationship started in October 2024.
Download the one-pager (PDF)$23,180 in the first month alone, with zero clinical disruption. More than half of that came from one surgical hemostat priced 58.8% below the prior supplier.
Download the one-pager (PDF)Twelve months of purchase order history, in Excel or CSV, from whatever system you use. If your system can't export every field, send what it has and we'll work with it.
Nothing. Supply Guard and the savings proposal are free. We earn our keep on the items you choose to buy from us.
No. You pick the items. Most hospitals start with a short list of the items with the biggest savings and add more as the monthly reports prove out.
Against your own prices. We use the lowest unit price you paid in the 90 days before your most recent purchase of each item, in the same unit of measure. No list prices, no inflated baselines.
We'll show you a clinically equivalent product side by side, and nothing changes unless you and your clinicians sign off on it.
If we can't identify $100,000 in annualized savings within 72 hours of receiving your data, we donate $1,000 to your hospital's charity of choice.
Supply chain leaders at independent hospitals usually work without a system office down the hall or a peer group built for their problems. So Mark founded the Independent Link Coalition, an AHRMM-backed peer network for exactly those leaders.
It's open to supply chain leaders at independent hospitals whether or not you ever buy from us. It's how we support these teams before, during and after any purchase.
Visit the communityBook 30 minutes with Mark, or just email your export and we'll take it from there. Either way you'll have your Supply Guard and a savings proposal within 72 hours of receiving your data.