She seeks to slice price hospitals pay.

• Author: Roush, Chris
• Position: PEOPLE - Susan DeVore

As a student at South Mecklenburg High School in the 1970s, Susan DeVore worked weekends at Mercy Hospital typing its policy-and-procedures manual. It helped her understand how a hospital works, she says. She returned a decade later as its controller and director of finance.

Now, she's president of Charlotte-based Premier Purchasing Partners LP, which helps more than 1,500 hospitals around the country cut costs by buying supplies in bulk. Her father worked for its predecessor in the 1970s. "I keep going full circle," DeVore, 45, says.

Premier Purchasing Partners is part of San Diego-based Premier Inc., which is owned by about 200 nonprofit hospitals and health-care systems. DeVore oversees the buying of about $19 billion in medical equipment and other needs from more than 800 suppliers each year.

Because of her clout in the industry and changes she is making in the purchase of medical supplies, she was named by Modern Healthcare magazine as the 67th most-powerful person in health care--ahead of people such as U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona. "I think the industry perceives that we're trying to do something very different."

She was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up in Alabama, Pennsylvania and Germany. Her father ran hospitals in the Air Force. When he retired from the military in 1974, the family moved to Charlotte. He went to work for SunHealth Alliance, which merged with two other companies in 1996 to form Premier Inc.

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After earning a bachelor's in business from UNC Charlotte in 1981, she worked as a health-care consultant for accounting firm Ernst & Whinney. She left in 1984 to become controller at Mercy. "I really felt like I needed the credibility of working in an operational role for a...