Knowledge Center

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.

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

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

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.

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.

This paper will define the regulation and explore how a supply chain department can support their organization in meeting this aspect of the regulations. Understanding the alphabet soup of acronyms that is Unique Device Identifier (UDI), their meaning, how to understand and read the standardized labeling are crucial first steps. Organizations should able to identify what defines an implant.

This case study provides a review of Grady Health System’s transformation from traditional Value Analysis Joint Product Review Team structure to Value Based Selection Committees which promote shared governance including system wide physicians and executives focusing on full integration of cost, quality, outcomes analysis to ensure selection of products offering the greatest overall value for cost reduction and improvement of outcomes.

Increasing federal regulation compliance costs and declining reimbursements have compressed hospital profitability. This is leading hospitals to turn to Supply Chain to reduce direct costs for supplies, devices, drugs, and purchased services. Traditionally Supply Chain has aggressively pursued these cost reductions through price reduction tactics. These techniques, however, are yielding diminishing savings returns.

This paper describes the development of a multidisciplinary and innovative product conversion process at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, when the existing process for changing products was dysfunctional.

This paper explores nine different methods of replenishing a hospital storage area and compares and contrasts the steps nursing must progress through to retrieve the supplies they need for their patients.