Knowledge Center

The AHRMM Learning Community held its first open forum on March 27 to discuss the health care supply chain's latest response to COVID-19. Moderated by Mike Schiller, AHRMM's senior director of supply chain.

In this webinar, we discuss the clinical contract evaluation process, including government requirements, expectations, and improving contract performance with the use of key performance indicators.

The perioperative services administration at Massachusetts General created a rigorous and rapid approach to raising the level of cost awareness among its nursing, surgical technician, and surgical staff. In this webinar, the leadership team shares how they used data capture to assess supply use and how they changed the culture in their hospital to be more cost aware.

Business continuity ensures that an organization can continue to operate in the event of a serious incident or disaster and encompasses strategic planning and preparation. In this webinar, a provider, a supplier, and a distributor discuss their roles and how they work together to develop and implement product continuity plans for a disaster or emergency.

In order to compare baseline costs to savings and determine areas of compliance risk, supply chain professionals need to work closely with their revenue cycle colleagues maintaining the chargemaster. This webinar explores how supply data elements in your item master and chargemaster play a role in negotiating payments, in disbursing across the continuum of care, and in assessing variations in clinical practice.

This session is a comprehensive approach to understanding Lean Management System concepts, processes, tools, and their application to improving inventory management in the health care supply chain.

Lean Management is a strategy for modifying processes so that we reduce the burden on supply chain resources, while still providing the customer with the value they want and expect. This webinar provides an overview of supply chain management and the areas that could be modified to reduce waste.

Although suppliers and providers may hesitate at a partnership approach, it is possible to collaborate on total cost of ownership. Learn from the diverse experiences of expert providers and suppliers in the field as they identify the variables that make a successful partnership, where pitfalls can happen, and steps to overcome challenges.

This session explains the benefits of implementing the UDI such as immediate device status updates through collaboration with manufacturers and suppliers, increased patient care satisfaction, and how the data you collect can turn your analytics into strategic and critical business decisions. Learn the step by step process that FMOLHS used to implement UDI.

Every organization has a variety of internal and external benchmarks at their disposal. Metrics need to be practical for each individual provider, and the supply chain must choose its measurements and comparisons carefully. In this webinar, we discuss meaningful benchmarking and explore several scenarios, useful metrics, and variation considerations to help make appropriate decisions that can improve supply chain performance.

In order to become data-driven organizations, healthcare providers need to leverage data standards and information technology. In the past, lack of standards across healthcare has been a major roadblock. However, numerous governmental and industry initiatives pursuing the adoption and implementation of supply chain standards across health IT systems are giving providers the opportunity to do just that. Standards lay the foundation for supply chain operations to leverage information technology to help transform healthcare providers into data-driven organizations.

Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality, and quite a bit of uncontrolled variation exists in the medical device industry today. Using dis-intermediation, or a rep-less model, for medical device purchases helps reduce this variation. In this webinar, we review the current industry model for medical device sales and the opportunity for innovation in this space.

A panel of three leading experts in the value analysis field candidly share information regarding the state of value analysis when they entered the field, their experiences during the evolution of value analysis to its current state in their respective organizations, and their thoughts on the future state of value analysis as well as lessons learned along the way.

In this four part webinar series, AHRMM explores how supply chain leaders can transform CQO from a concept into a strategy. Each 30 minute webinar will dive into a different best practice including capturing and applying alternative data sets, establishing a clinically integrated supply chain, and creating an outcomes-based contracting strategy.

Tracking surgical supplies is a challenge. Average returns for picked supplies is low, O.R. in-and-out traffic to retrieve items is high, and significant staff hours are spent checking consumption, restocking, and locating supplies. UTMC and DeRoyal have developed a "smart" radio frequency identification trash bin that tracks inventory used during a case, charges for that inventory, and shows where items are located in the room in real time.

Tremendous cost pressures within the U.S. health care system are forcing providers to explore alternative ways to save money. To address this need, a TCO calculator has been developed to provide purchasers with a standardized and systematic way to consider the various use and waste costs of products that are procured. This webinar demonstrates the tool’s basic functions and shares resources available to support its use.

Wellmont Health System in Tennessee has developed a scorecard to help supply chain executives convince even the toughest clinicians and hospital administrators to collaborate and drive down overall costs (while maintaining the highest standards of patient care and safety) by speaking their language: evidence. This webinar provides detail on how to use the DRG scorecard. An excel file of the scorecard is provided upon completion.

Health care costs continue to rise at an alarming rate, growing well ahead of inflation. In this webinar, we compare and contrast the education and training practices for supply chain professionals in each sector, the use of Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR), and the use of actual usage data at the last leg of the supply chain as a means to enhance automated inventory control strategies.

Yankee Alliance facilitated an Orthopedic Total Joint Collaborative in order to identify opportunities for quality improvement and cost reduction, resulting in documented savings of over $8M. In this webinar, the collaborative approach is reviewed as well as the methods deployed to achieve savings, including implant and reimbursement benchmarking, contract strategies, and perioperative supplies utilizing data analysis.

The supply chain ecosystem has contributed to the 25% waste in the health care system. We can accept that reality while at the same time learning to incorporate spend reduction and cost recovery efforts as standard practice. Through technology, we can broaden communication across the health care community to become more efficient, free funds for other initiatives, and add greater value to health care.