Hospitals are notoriously bad spenders.
Purchasing must-have medical supplies is often an ordeal for employees, a process commonly riddled with red tape and no guarantee that the needle, scalpel or even gauze will be in hand when needed.
That was a common scenario at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which until this year, was stuck in a time warp — using old-fashioned carbon-copy order forms to purchase ultramodern tools used to conduct state-of-the-art medical research.
