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Hospital PMI® at 58.5%; November 2024 Hospital ISM® Report On Business®

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TEMPE, Ariz., Dec. 6, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Economic activity in the hospital subsector grew in November for the 15th consecutive month after contracting twice in the previous four-month period, with 35 consecutive months of growth prior to that, say the nation’s hospital supply executives in the latest Hospital ISM® Report On Business®.

The report was issued today by Nancy LeMaster, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Hospital Business Survey Committee: “The Hospital PMI® registered 58.5 percent in November, a 6.6-percentage point increase from the October reading of 51.9 percent, indicating a 15th consecutive month of growth. The Business Activity Index moved back into expansion territory after contracting in October for the first time in 15 months. The New Orders Index returned to expansion after contracting in the previous month, and the Employment Index was ‘unchanged’ in November. The Supplier Deliveries Index remained in expansion (which indicates slower delivery performance) for the 15th consecutive month. The Case Mix Index was ‘unchanged’ in November, registering 50 percent, a decrease of 2 percentage points from the previous month’s figure of 52 percent. The Days Payable Outstanding Index returned to expansion in November, registering 54 percent, up 8.5 percentage points from the 45.5 percent reported in October. The Technology Spend Index reading of 59 percent is a decrease of 2 percentage points compared to the 61 percent recorded in October. The Touchless Orders Index remained in expansion territory in November, registering 51 percent, up 0.5 percentage point from the 50.5 percent reported in October.”

LeMaster continues, “Hospital Business Survey panelists indicated their facilities continued to struggle with IV fluid shortages, which caused some elective surgeries to be rescheduled. However, the situation was not as bad as it was in October. Conservation efforts and an increase in imported fluids, along with strong seasonal hospital demand, resulted in a volume rebound for most organizations. Panelists indicated that supplier deliveries were slower and attributed that to weather issues and backlogs from the East Coast ports strike. They also commented on an increase in product allocations and substitutions. The increase in patient volumes resulted in a slight increase in the Employment Index. Several panelists mentioned their organizations were undergoing full-time employee reduction initiatives to improve margins. Strong volumes are anticipated through year’s end.”

Hospital PMI® History

Month

Hospital PMI®

Month

Hospital PMI®

Nov 2024

58.5

May 2024

58.4

Oct 2024

51.9

Apr 2024

53.5

Sep 2024

55.0

Mar 2024

52.3

Aug 2024

58.6

Feb 2024

56.6

Jul 2024

53.3

Jan 2024

61.5

Jun 2024

55.8

Dec 2023

62.5

Average for 12 months – 56.5

High – 62.5

Low – 51.9

About This Report
The information compiled in this report is for the month of November 2024.

The Hospital PMI® was developed in collaboration with the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM), an association for the health care supply chain profession, and a professional membership group of the American Hospital Association (AHA).

The data presented herein is obtained from a survey of hospital supply executives based on information they have collected within their respective organizations. ISM® makes no representation, other than that stated within this release, regarding the individual company data collection procedures. The data should be compared to all other economic data sources when used in decision-making.

Data and Method of Presentation
The Hospital ISM® Report On Business® is based on data compiled from hospital purchasing and supply executives nationwide. Survey responses reflect the change, if any, in the current month compared to the previous month. For each of the indicators measured (Business Activity, New Orders, Employment, Supplier Deliveries, Inventories, Prices, Prices: Pharmaceuticals, Prices: Supplies, Backlog of Orders, Imports, Inventory Sentiment, Case Mix, Days Payable Outstanding, Technology Spend, and Touchless Orders), this report shows the percentage reporting each response and the diffusion index. Responses represent raw data and are never changed. Beginning in January 2021, the Report On Business® staff and consultants are gathering market information to better validate the Exports Index. Exports Index data are still being collected.

The Hospital PMI® is a composite index computed from the following, equally weighted indexes: Business Activity, New Orders, Employment and Supplier Deliveries. Diffusion indexes have the properties of leading indicators and are convenient summary measures showing the prevailing direction of change and the scope of change. A Hospital PMI® index reading above 50 percent indicates that the hospital sub-sector is generally expanding; below 50 percent indicates that it is generally declining. For the sub-indexes, except Supplier Deliveries, an index reading above 50 percent indicates that the sub-index is generally expanding; below 50 percent indicates that it is generally contracting. A Supplier Deliveries Index above 50 percent indicates slower deliveries and below 50 percent indicates faster deliveries.

The Hospital ISM® Report On Business® survey is sent out to the Hospital Business Survey Panel respondents the first part of each month. Respondents are asked to ONLY report on U.S. operations for the current month. ISM® receives survey responses throughout most of any given month, with the majority of respondents generally waiting until late in the month to submit responses to give the most accurate picture of current business activity. ISM® then compiles the report for release on the fifth business day of the following month.

ISM ROB Content
The Institute for Supply Management® (“ISM”) Report On Business® (Manufacturing, Services, and Hospital reports) (“ISM ROB”) contains information, text, files, images, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, and any other materials or content (collectively, “Content”) of ISM (“ISM ROB Content”). ISM ROB Content is protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret, and other laws, and as between you and ISM, ISM owns and retains all rights in the ISM ROB Content. ISM hereby grants you a limited, revocable, nonsublicensable license to access and display on your individual device the ISM ROB Content (excluding any software code) solely for your personal, non-commercial use. The ISM ROB Content shall also contain Content of users and other ISM licensors. Except as provided herein or as explicitly allowed in writing by ISM, you shall not copy, download, stream, capture, reproduce, duplicate, archive, upload, modify, translate, publish, broadcast, transmit, retransmit, distribute, perform, display, sell, or otherwise use any ISM ROB Content.

Except as explicitly and expressly permitted by ISM, you are strictly prohibited from creating works or materials (including, but not limited to tables, charts, data streams, time-series variables, fonts, icons, link buttons, wallpaper, desktop themes, online postcards, montages, mashups and similar videos, greeting cards, and unlicensed merchandise) that derive from or are based on the ISM ROB Content. This prohibition applies regardless of whether the derivative works or materials are sold, bartered, or given away. You shall not either directly or through the use of any device, software, internet site, web-based service, or other means remove, alter, bypass, avoid, interfere with, or circumvent any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices marked on the Content or any digital rights management mechanism, device, or other content protection or access control measure associated with the Content including geo-filtering mechanisms. Without prior written authorization from ISM, you shall not build a business utilizing the Content, whether or not for profit.

You shall not create, recreate, distribute, incorporate in other work, or advertise an index of any portion of the Content unless you receive prior written authorization from ISM. Requests for permission to reproduce or distribute ISM ROB Content can be made by contacting Rose Marie Goupil in writing at: ISM Research, Institute for Supply Management, 309 W. Elliot Road, Suite 113, Tempe, AZ 85284-1556, or by emailing rgoupil@ismworld.org; Subject: Content Request.

ISM shall not have any liability, duty, or obligation for or relating to the ISM ROB Content or other information contained herein, any errors, inaccuracies, omissions or delays in providing any ISM ROB Content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. In no event shall ISM be liable for any special, incidental, or consequential damages, arising out of the use of the ISM ROB. Report On Business®, PMI®, Manufacturing PMI®, Services PMI®, and Hospital PMI® are registered trademarks and trademarks of Institute for Supply Management®. Institute for Supply Management® and ISM® are registered trademarks of Institute for Supply Management, Inc.

About Institute for Supply Management®
Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) is the first and leading not-for-profit professional supply management organization worldwide. Its community of more than 50,000 in more than 100 countries manages about US$1 trillion in corporate and government supply chain procurement annually. Founded in 1915 by practitioners, ISM is committed to advancing the practice of supply management to drive value and competitive advantage for its members, contributing to a prosperous and sustainable world. ISM empowers and leads the profession through the ISM® Report On Business®, its highly regarded certification and training programs, corporate services, events, and assessments. The ISM® Report On Business®, Manufacturing, Services, and Hospital, are three of the most reliable economic indicators available, providing guidance to supply management professionals, economists, analysts, and government and business leaders. For more information, please visit: www.ismworld.org.

The text version of the public Hospital ISM® Report On Business® is posted on ISM®’s website at www.ismrob.org on the fifth business day* of every month at 10:00 a.m. ET.

The next Hospital ISM® Report On Business® featuring December 2024 data will be released at 10:00 a.m. ET on Thursday, January 9, 2025.

*Unless the New York Stock Exchange is closed.

Contact:   

Rose Marie Goupil

Report On Business® Analyst

ISM®, ROB/Program Manager

Tempe, Arizona

+1 480.752.6276, ext. 3005

Email: rgoupil@ismworld.org

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SOURCE Institute for Supply Management

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CollectivIQ Introduces GigaBrain, Giving Enterprises a Shared Brain That Gets Smarter as Employees Work

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New Enterprise Intelligence Layer Turns the Collective Learnings of AI Agents Into Secure, Usable Organizational Knowledge

BOSTON, Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CollectivIQ, the collective intelligence platform built to give employees more honest AI insights and digital teammates that put its intelligence to work, today announced the availability of GigaBrain, a new shared intelligence layer that enables organizations to capture, connect, and use the knowledge accumulated by employees and their Digital Direct Reports (DDRs), which are specialized AI teammates that work for people much like human direct reports do. Every company has valuable knowledge that lives outside its formal systems, across various tools, residing in employees’ heads, embedded in conversations, and lodged in disparate company applications. GigaBrain is designed to make that collective intelligence available to the organization and its employees.

As employees work with their Digital Direct Reports, those AI teammates develop context about their work, including projects, processes, responsibilities, relationships, and preferences. With GigaBrain, those individual learnings can contribute to a shared enterprise memory, allowing knowledge developed in one part of an organization to make AI more useful across the business. The result is an enterprise AI environment that gets smarter through use. Rather than requiring employees to repeatedly find, upload or explain the same information, GigaBrain gives employees and their Digital Direct Reports access to relevant organizational context when they need it.

When a sales representative’s DDR learns the intricacies of a customer’s procurement process, including approval requirements, key decision-makers, and purchasing timelines, that knowledge can automatically become available to other team members, subject to appropriate access permissions. When the customer reaches out for help, the team will already have the context needed to navigate the relationship effectively, without asking the customer to repeat information or relying on a manual handoff.

“Companies are collectively spending billions to bring intelligence to their employees, but very little of that investment makes the company itself smarter,” said John Davie, CEO of CollectivIQ. “The breakthrough isn’t just giving every employee an AI teammate, it’s making sure what those employees and AI teammates learn becomes an advantage for the entire organization. GigaBrain turns everyday work into intelligence that compounds across the enterprise.”

While enterprise AI platforms such as Microsoft Copilot and Glean help employees access organizational information, GigaBrain is designed to capture knowledge that emerges through employees’ day-to-day interactions with their DDRs, including insights that may never be formally documented. GigaBrain creates an organizational knowledge layer that can connect what employees and their Digital Direct Reports learn through everyday work, giving AI access to relevant internal context alongside the broader knowledge available from large language models.

GigaBrain was built to provide a source of enterprise knowledge that Digital Direct Reports can draw upon as they work, including the ability to trace information back to its source, giving employees greater visibility into where organizational knowledge came from, and helping AI work from relevant company context. Employees do not need to manually document every useful insight for the system to become more valuable. As they collaborate with their Digital Direct Reports, relevant knowledge can become part of the enterprise intelligence available to other authorized AI teammates.

GigaBrain is also designed for the realities of enterprise information governance, as employees can use an incognito mode when working with information that should not contribute to shared organizational memory, giving users a way to keep sensitive or confidential interactions out of GigaBrain.

GigaBrain expands CollectivIQ’s vision for Digital Direct Reports beyond individual AI productivity, allowing the knowledge developed through that work to become part of a broader organizational intelligence layer. Together, they give companies a foundation for AI that does more than answer questions. CollectivIQ’s ecosystem can learn how an organization works, retain what it learns and make that knowledge useful across the enterprise.

GigaBrain is available through the CollectivIQ platform. For more information, visit www.collectiviq.ai.

About CollectivIQ

CollectivIQ is the collective intelligence platform built to give employees more accurate AI insights and teammates that put its intelligence to work. Founded by the leadership team behind Buyers Edge Platform, CollectivIQ was built to bring accountability, action, and economic alignment to enterprise AI adoption. Learn more at www.collectiviq.ai.

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SOURCE CollectivIQ

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Pactum Launches Intake Agent, Cutting Purchase Request Cycle Time by 90%

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New AI agent replaces complicated purchase forms and repeated follow-ups by completing and checking every request before it is submitted, inside Microsoft Teams, Coupa, and SAP Ariba.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Pactum, the most advanced agentic AI platform for enterprise autonomous procurement execution, today announced the launch of its Intake Agent, which lets employees describe what they need to buy in plain language. The agent turns each request into a complete, correctly coded requisition and checks it against company buying policies before it is submitted.  Available now in Microsoft Teams, Coupa, and SAP Ariba, the Intake Agent connects with Pactum’s other agents to enable end-to-end autonomous indirect procurement. A purchase can draw on an existing contract or move to autonomous sourcing and negotiation, with a human buyer handling requests that require judgment.

The launch extends Pactum’s growing portfolio of AI agents to the start of indirect procurement, covering purchases such as software, office equipment, and professional services. It brings Pactum’s co-founders’ vision of procurement run with AI agents from the first request through sourcing and negotiation into operation. Procurement teams set the buying rules once, and the agent applies them to every request, whatever its value.

“Procurement teams can now run indirect procurement with full autonomy while remaining in control and managing the exceptions,” said Kaspar Korjus, Co-Founder and CEO of Pactum. “Our Intake Agent helps resolve questions earlier so requests can move forward with less back-and-forth and teams can focus on the decisions that need their expertise.”

For employees, finding an approved supplier or selecting the right accounting code can require expertise across procurement, finance, operations, and IT teams. Missing or incorrect information can lead to rejected requisitions and repeated follow-ups, leaving buyers to focus on correcting forms instead of focusing on supplier relationships and commercial decisions. Review queues can stretch from days to weeks.

With Pactum Intake, employees describe what the business needs, whether goods or services of any complexity, and can provide supporting documents such as a supplier quote. The agent uses the request and relevant documents to identify the best procurement category and complete the accounting and supplier details. It asks only the follow-up questions needed to complete the requisition. Once the request is checked, it is handed off to another Pactum digital worker to autonomously source and negotiate for better pricing and terms where required.

“Building software that assists procurement professionals is relatively easy. Building software that runs the whole process on its own, from the first request to the final purchase, is much harder,” said Kristjan Korjus, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Pactum. “It is the difference between driver assistance and a car with no one behind the wheel. Most procurement AI still needs a buyer at the wheel for every request. Our AI agents take the request all the way to the purchase on their own, and it is remarkable to watch them pass the work from one agent to the next.”

The launch follows Pactum’s Requisition Alignment Agent surpassing one million requisition checks, which validates purchase requests against company buying policies, existing contracts, and approved suppliers. Intake builds on this foundation in policy enforcement by connecting employee requests with agents that carry out sourcing and negotiation.

For more information about Pactum Intake, visit https://pactum.com/procurement-agents/intake.     

About Pactum:

Since 2019, Pactum has been leading the shift to autonomous procurement. Its AI agents check every purchase request against a company’s policies, contracts and approved suppliers, source and negotiate with suppliers in more than 40 languages, and work inside Coupa and SAP Ariba. Pactum agents are relied on by more than 60 of the world’s largest enterprises. To learn more, visit www.pactum.com.

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SOURCE Pactum

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Crush Security Launches Crush Dollar Exposure, Turning Cyber Risk Into Dollars and Showing Which Security Investments Reduce It Most

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New financial risk intelligence capability uses FAIR-informed modeling, Monte Carlo analysis and security data to help CISOs and CFOs quantify cyber exposure, prioritize remediation and communicate financial risk to executive leadership.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Crush Security today announced the launch of Crush Dollar Exposure, a new capability within its cybersecurity intelligence platform that translates cyber risk into financial exposure and helps organizations identify which security improvements can deliver the greatest reduction in potential financial loss.

For years, cybersecurity teams have measured their environments through vulnerabilities, risk scores, compliance percentages and control gaps. While valuable to security operations, those measurements often fail to answer the fundamental questions that executives and boards need answered:

How much could our cybersecurity weaknesses cost the business, and where should we invest to reduce that exposure?

Crush Dollar Exposure is designed to answer those questions by connecting an organization’s security posture, control coverage, threat intelligence and industry financial loss data to a quantitative view of cyber risk. The result is a financial perspective that enables security and business leaders to evaluate potential losses, compare remediation priorities and make more informed investment decisions.

From Technical Risk Scores to Financial Decisions

Traditional cybersecurity assessments often produce long lists of findings ranked by technical severity. But the most technically severe vulnerability is not necessarily the one that represents the greatest potential financial loss to the organization.

Crush Dollar Exposure changes the decision-making process by evaluating security gaps through their estimated contribution to financial risk. The capability provides four principal measurements:

Annualized Financial Exposure: An estimate of potential annual cyber losses, expressed in dollars.Financial Exposure Relative to Revenue: A view of modeled cyber exposure in relation to the organization’s annual revenue, providing business context.Value-at-Risk Analysis: Potential loss thresholds at selected probability levels, supported by loss-exceedance curves that illustrate the range of possible financial outcomes.Financially Prioritized Remediation: Security control gaps ranked by their modeled contribution to financial exposure, helping teams identify where remediation may reduce the most risk.

Rather than simply reporting that a security control is missing or a vulnerability is critical, Crush Dollar Exposure helps organizations understand the potential financial consequences and prioritize corrective action accordingly.

Connecting Every Security Gap to Business Impact

One of the capability’s key differentiators is its ability to connect security control weaknesses to modeled loss scenarios and financial consequences.

For example, a security team evaluating investments in identity protection, endpoint security and vulnerability remediation can use the model to determine which weaknesses contribute most significantly to estimated financial exposure. This allows security leaders to move beyond asking which problem is technically most severe and begin asking which investment is likely to provide the greatest financial risk reduction.

The analysis also connects control gaps to underlying loss scenarios, helping organizations understand how multiple weaknesses may contribute to the same business risk. For CFOs and executive teams, this provides a more financially grounded way to evaluate cybersecurity spending. For CISOs, it creates a defensible framework for explaining security priorities and communicating their potential business impact.

Transparent, Reproducible Risk Modeling — Not a Black-Box AI Score

Crush Dollar Exposure uses a quantitative methodology informed by the Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) framework and Monte Carlo simulation to model possible financial losses.

The methodology incorporates security control coverage, industry-relevant threat activity, recognized adversary techniques, organizational characteristics and established financial loss reference data.

Unlike opaque risk-scoring approaches, the capability is designed to make the assumptions, data inputs and modeled loss scenarios underlying its financial estimates visible and reviewable. Although Crush Security’s broader platform includes Cassandra, its AI-powered security advisor, the financial risk calculations themselves rely on defined quantitative modeling rather than generative AI.

The capability distinguishes between uncertainty in modeled financial outcomes and confidence in the quality of supporting data, helping executives understand both the estimated exposure and the limitations of the underlying analysis. This transparency is intended to support repeatable analysis, auditability and more defensible conversations with boards, regulators and financial stakeholders.

Giving CISOs and CFOs a Common Language

“Cybersecurity leaders are constantly asked to justify their budgets, but we’re still presenting information to boards that doesn’t directly answer the questions they’re asking,” said Josh Jones, CEO and Co-Founder of Crush Security. “Boards don’t just want to know how many vulnerabilities you have or how many security tools you’ve deployed. They want to understand what the risk could cost the business, where their money is going, and whether those investments are making a measurable difference.”

“With Crush Dollar Exposure, we’re connecting cybersecurity decisions to financial outcomes. Our goal is to give every CISO the ability to walk into a board meeting and explain their organization’s estimated financial exposure, identify the gaps driving it, and show which actions have the greatest potential to reduce that risk.” -Joshua Jones, CEO-

Built on the Crush Security Intelligence Platform

Crush Dollar Exposure extends Crush Security’s intelligence platform, which brings together vendor, control, compliance and threat data to support security investment decisions.

Powered by Cassandra, the platform helps organizations identify coverage gaps, compare technology and vendors, and optimize cybersecurity spending.

Risk calculations are performed within each customer’s data environment, with customer-specific information remaining within its designated security boundary. Anonymized and aggregated industry reference information supports comparative risk modeling.

Availability

Crush Dollar Exposure is available now within the Crush Security platform. Organizations interested in quantifying their financial cyber exposure, evaluating remediation priorities or scheduling a demonstration can visit www.CrushSecurity.com. Access information is available directly from Crush Security.

About Crush Security

Crush Security is a veteran-owned cybersecurity technology and advisory company headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Its proprietary intelligence platform, advisory services and cybersecurity procurement data help customers make data-driven technology purchasing decisions leveraging Crush Security’s resell capabilities.

Cassandra, its AI-powered advisor, unifies security, vendor and compliance intelligence to identify gaps, optimize investments, quantify risk and evaluate solutions to shorten the decision time and accuracy for each project.

Crush Security’s core intelligence platform is currently included at no separate subscription cost with eligible customer engagements.

Website: www.CrushSecurity.com

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SOURCE Crush Security Group Inc

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