Stepping Up Our Game
by Joe Pugliese, President and CEO

Last April the board and staff of the Hemophilia Alliance met to lay out a five-year strategic plan. When the smoke cleared, we came away from the meeting with an impressive list of things we needed to accomplish, with tight timelines and easy to measure metrics. The Alliance team met afterwards to digest the key goals. Our esteemed legal counsel Issie Karan famously commented that it was a c**p ton of work.

The regions have long worked on the concept of continuous improvement. We felt that if we wanted to be able to reach out and assist each HTC, we needed to reorganize and expand our team. The new Alliance organization chart provides greater focus to the entire team. We have renamed the Payer team the Member and Community Relations Team reflecting our constantly growing relationship with all parts of the bleeding disorders community: HTCs, regions, chapters, national patient organizations, payers, THSNA, ATHN, HTRS, WFH, policy makers and manufacturers.

We posted two open positions for Director of Member and Community Relations. We were blessed with over 20 great candidates that went through one or more interviews. We want to thank all the finalists for their interest and expertise, that made making the final decision a challenge. I’m pleased to announce that the Alliance has hired two outstanding candidates who are the best fit and bring the most value for the needs of the organization and our members today. They both come from HTCs, which is ironic but makes sense. They have over 30 years of experience actively managing HTCs and they have outstanding relationships with their local chapters.

We are delighted to have Angela Blue and Zack Duffy join Team Alliance. They will both be starting on April 10th, giving them time to assure a smooth transition from their present roles. They will of course be able to share their decades of operational expertise with the rest of the Alliance team and learn from them as well. The focus of course will be the Alliance members and the broader community.

I always like to benchmark our organization to compared to others in this space that provide services to the HTCs, though it is difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison. We operate as a 501(c)3, which means that anyone can view our 990s. The relevant other organizational comparisons are difficult because “similar” service providers are private companies, which means that their books aren’t public though they often boast of pouring money back into the HTCs.

Here are the numbers for the Alliance: We saved HTCs $130 million just on GPO contract purchases in 2022. Our payer efforts returned 45 million units of replacement product to the HTCs. We provide operational, legal, advocacy and lobbying support. We also contributed more than $3,000,000 back to the community. Our members paid a total of $466,800 in membership dues. Based on my 44 years of experience in this space and the team we have assembled for your benefit, which has over 200 years of experience in the Bleeding Disorders Community. I know that the Alliance can help you save even more on the administrative side of running an HTC, while growing your market share. This represents a return on investment (ROI) of 27,749%.

We can do more; just give us a call! Why spend money on administrative costs paid to for profit organizations? We would rather see you spend resources on maintaining and expanding the outstanding clinical care for the benefit the bleeding disorders community.