Is Your Hospital Making These Million Dollar Mistakes in SCM?
October 31, 2018
Is Your Hospital Making These Million Dollar Mistakes in SCM? The 3 Million Dollar Mistakes
The supply chain in healthcare industry is the second largest expense for providers and the costs are only growing. With a lot of providers, only labor is costing the more on wasted funds. Moreover, the supply chain is increasingly complex.
It’s not only about electronic ordering, but also pairing contract pricing to order pricing, retaining a clean and current data item master and verifying the trading and product partner information. We’ve already talked about bending the cost curve, and supply chain management is a huge place to improve.
The supply chain is the foundation for building better end-to-end clarity of each one of the devices, supplies and products applied for healthcare use. This is crucial to better running facilities.
To make sure you and your facility avoids a lot of the error-prone areas, it’s beneficial to look into automating and streamlining the healthcare supply chain process to find savings as well as finding where you’re throwing most of your money away. Only doing this can prevent up to 12% of supply chain losses.
1. Spearheading Contract Price Veracity and Visibility
Healthcare providers demand enhanced ways of managing prices for items purchased both on contract and off contract. The best preventive measures include identifying the products (and prices) the provider is usually getting.
Products that may be getting acquired off-contract and identifying similar products to find out whether or not they’re groupable into contracts in future buys. Then, assimilate those items to a group purchasing organization (GPO) or contracts among each supplier.
2. Producing Visibility into Demand Forecasting and Signals
Reducing healthcare costs through supply chain management also rests on visibility into product demand. These days, the majority of manufacturers don’t take stock of the millions of dollars of in field products. As with any business line, there’s a need to have a future projection to coordinate everywhere resources will get sent. Strategic planning can be the difference between the growth or death of a hospital.
In the management of supply chains, organizations should have a forecast for procurement, production and logistics. First, the best measures involve connecting the healthcare community to a shared infrastructure in order to build greater visibility. Afterward, enabling sources of aggregated data for enhanced demand forecasting and planning works most efficiently according to the Institute of Business Forecast and Planning.
A way to track the advantages of forecasting is to look at how much might have been squandered if the forecast wasn’t precise. An additional way to would be to see how much would have been earned (or preserved) with better forecasting.
3. Making Sure Product Data and Inventory Repositories are Accurate
Providers have to be prepared to purchase the right products and suppliers have to be prepared to offer that product. For best results, make sure accurate data is referenced to products.
Continuing to enhance a shared repository of up to date information, allowing items providers have in stock to be viewed and offering tracking information on the things providers actually utilize (and thus need) is also vital.
Make sure to also be careful about when you are replacing equipment. Don’t just throw out thousands of dollars to replace old and well functioning equipment if it isn’t necessary.
The main drive of new business procedures is going to rest in compliance with Meaningful Use Stage 1. This centers around data sharing and capturing. When providers start going more towards new business obligations, they’re able to consider the supply chain as a foundation.
It’ll be the main element of technology infrastructure. Then, more sharing and capturing of the needed data will be taken into consideration. For instance, facilities that are capturing information about each of the medical products and devices being used throughout patient processing can be sent to other locations to combat such issues facing healthcare.
This means the electronic health record (EHR) can be captured for a multitude of applications that improves compliance and efficiency. Saving resources within healthcare supply chain management are vital for increasing patient care and engagement at every point of communication within the relationship. Using these recommended practices during supply chain management is the best place to begin.