WASHINGTON—AOAExcel, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Optometric Association (AOA), is introducing at the association’s Optometry’s Meeting here a new business partnership with Intalere that will open the door to discounted purchasing opportunities for AOA members.

AOA members can “join” Intalere and get access to its volume-negotiated discounts at no cost, according to Intalere and AOAExcel executives. Intalere offers discounts on purchases from vendors such as Staples, Verizon, Sprint, Office Depot/Office Max and FedEx, among others, according to promotional materials it provided at the AOA meeting.

“We’ve partnered with [Intalere] to provide these deep discounts to our members,” AOAExcel managing director Bob Kehm told VMail. “Thousands of independent optometrists now have a vehicle that they can use to save [a double-digit percentage] on purchases of these goods,” he added.

Kehm and AOAExcel chairman Joe E. Ellis, OD, provided some of the background and details on the new partnership with Intalere in an interview Thursday with VMail at the AOA meeting. Ellis said the AOAExcel board has been evaluating group purchasing programs “over the last four or five years” before agreeing to the partnership with Intalere, which is “substantially owned” by Intermountain Healthcare of Salt Lake City.

“This is typically how large hospital systems and large medical organizations run,” Ellis added. “We felt like we needed to be able to find the same thing for our members.”

Intalere, which is based in St. Louis, is a “professional supply chain company offering a comprehensive suite of services to empower health care providers to better manage their entire non-labor spend and ultimately deliver superior care,” according to its website.

It works with acute care hospitals, long-term care facilities and clinics. (Intalere receives a percentage of the aggregate purchases that are recorded by its vendor/retailer members, such as Verizon or Office Depot, according to officials.)

Kehm and Ellis said the partnership with Intalere is a group purchasing program that differs from traditional buying groups in at least three significant ways:

• AOA members can participate at no cost, or membership fees.
• Participants in the Intalere program can be “of any size” business.
• The program is flexible, allowing participants to receive a discount on as few as one product category.

“One of the things that excited us the most about this [partnership] is the flexibility from the member perspective,” Kehm explained.

Intalere at this time does not have negotiated purchasing programs in place with such traditional industry suppliers as frames and lens companies, but these are potential categories that Intalere could explore in the future, according to Ellis.

Another advantage of the new partnership, according to Ellis, is that it is really “a tangible member benefit that they can see in dollars and cents.”