Knowledge Center

The annual CQO Summit brings together health care supply chain leaders in a collaborative forum to discuss top-of-mind issues facing the health care field. The theme of this year’s Summit was managing resources in the “new normal.” It featured thought-provoking presentations on workforce optimization, supply chain analytics, and the health care financial landscape.

A detailed example of a new Master of Health Administration (MHA) program with a medical logistics concentration.

Learn how Baptist Health forged its traditional AP cost center into a cost savings driver.

Supply chain attributes inform critical supply availability and alignment with internal and external needs, integral to meeting pressures to deliver safe care.

In this case study, learn how Kaleida Health drove system-wide clinical-supply integration using three key strategies to build a clinically integrated supply chain.

Explore opportunities for improving the procure-to-pay cycle to generate better outcomes for both health care organizations and their supplier partners.

Consider how direct sourcing can enable access to PPE and the leading practices of building supply chain diversity and resiliency for the future in this Banner Health case study.

Healthcare expenses continue to rise and yet hospitals are realizing consistently shrinking margins. Healthcare supply costs are typically the second largest expense to a hospital and must be managed in a manner that ensures providers have access to quality products but also with an emphasis on cost awareness and expense reduction strategies. Healthcare supply chains must leverage their data in order to make better business decisions to reduce costs and increase operational efficiencies through the use of business analytics.

Tremendous value can be achieved by investing Supply Chain Management (SCM) resources into shared services where optimizing the supply chain is not normally a top priority. This paper will discuss an example where SCM partnered with the Nutrition and Food Services (NFS) department within a medical center.

Explore your organization’s clinical integration maturity and leverage leadership involvement to make data-driven decisions.

This paper shares the experience of a true and complete integration of supply chain in a mid-sized IDN under an accelerated timeline. The study is structured to provide a basic framework for integration that can be used as a guide and customized to meet the specific needs of any system. Author: Richard Killeen Download Paper

AHRMM19 CQO Summit White Paper entitled CQO: The Power of Clinical Integration.

This paper will focus on three areas that are thought to be key components for a strong logistics program. Those are improving visibility, enhancing delivery options, and actionable analytics. Author: Nicole A. Mazzei-Williams Download Paper

This paper will share Concord Hospital’s journey to ISO 9001 certification, define the quality management system (QMS), the six key policies of the QMS and outline the key components of each of those policies as they relate to supply chain. Author: Jodi Panzino, MBA, PMP, CMRP, Director, Supply Chain Management, Concord Hospital. Download Paper

2018 AHRMM CQO Summit: Each year at the annual AHRMM Cost, Quality and Outcomes (CQO) Summit, participants throughout the health care field come together to share their knowledge, leading practices and ideas on supply chain’s role in delivering higher quality care at a more affordable cost. The CQO Summit discussions, in turn, inform the next year’s CQO report, which guides the development of the agenda for that year’s Summit.

As health care organizations look for ways to meaningfully impact cost, quality and outcomes, they are expanding the care delivery continuum and increasingly transitioning services out of the hospital and into non-acute settings. Today, 95 percent of patient visits take place in non-acute care facilities, from the physician’s office to patients’ homes. This volume is likely to grow as health systems turn to new models designed to impact the health of target patient populations.

Today hospitals and health care organizations are looking to health care supply chain professionals to help support patient care activities. No longer is the supply chain department and its staff relegated to a purely operational position of providing inventory and stocking.  The supply chain now has a voice at the table with representation on committees and working quality improvement projects. With collaboration, there is a major fiscal, administrative, and operational role to play.

The lack of end-to-end supply chain visibility in the medical device channel contributes to an estimated five billion dollars ($5B) of inventory waste for the U.S. health system today. (PNC Healthcare and GHX, 2011) RFID is a key technology that is enabling health systems, distributors and manufactures to partner together to remove this waste. Successful implementation of RFID in a healthcare delivery organization takes careful planning, execution, and change management agility.

In an effort to capture broader insights on UDI adoption from across the health care field, AHRMM, with participation by the FDA, held LUC Data Quality Workshops during four conferences in 2017. During these workshops, conference attendees had the opportunity to voice their opinions on the state of UDI data quality, hurdles to UDI adoption and what recommended practices are necessary for providers and suppliers to effectively capture the UDI and use it in meaningful ways.  

In 2014, AHRMM hosted the first Cost, Quality, and Outcomes (CQO) Summit to bring healthcare thought leaders together to discuss particular supply chain issues and concerns. The results of those conversations were used to develop the first task force and to shape the agenda for the second CQO Summit, held in 2015. This white paper was written as a recap of the AHRMM17 CQO Summit, held in July 2017 in Washington, D.C.