Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Ref. #NRE2006-23

MERCY ROI, Serving 19 Hospitals, Helps to Solve Eighth Leading Cause of Death in U.S.!

St. Louis, MO, December 18, 2006 — MERCY ROI has won the Supply Chain Innovator of the Year Award for 2006. The award recognizes innovative solutions that produce quantifiable and sustainable improvements in supply chain operations and is granted by The Research Strategies Committee of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals and the editorial team of Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies Magazine.

The Sisters of Mercy Health System in St. Louis made a bold move when they created MERCY ROI (Resource, Optimization and Innovation), an affiliate company within their wing of 19 hospitals in a four state integrated system, to deal directly with increasing efficiency, decreasing fallible expenditures and most importantly, reducing the number of patient deaths caused by medical error-the eighth largest cause of death in our nation.

In the complex world of the supply chain industry, MERCY ROI, under the leadership of President Vance Moore, took matters into their own hands and began to analyze their current healthcare structure. They discovered that all 19 hospitals acted independently with separate information systems and medical and surgical supply. They talked with physicians and stakeholders and came to the conclusion that the answer to fixing a broken supply chain pipeline had to do with establishing a single enterprise-wide management system and cutting out the middlemen between manufacturers and the hospital loading dock.

After extensively analyzing current operations, ROI became the Sisters of Mercy's own group purchasing organization, a self-financing for-profit arm of the company. They implemented common materials management software for their entire network that began to ensure consistency, were able to evaluate and track medicine ordering patterns, and began to get a clear picture of usage patterns. ROI then established a 100,000 square foot Consolidated Service Center in Springfield MO to provide warehousing and order fulfillment for all the hospitals in the system, implemented TECSYS' warehouse management system which helped the serial tracking in the pharmaceutical and medical/surgical world and invested heavily in communications software. This led to the creation of Mercy Meds; a program of medicine management instrumented with sophisticated equipment, barcodes and scanners that led the route of medicine management from the supply shelf to the patient with an enormous increase in efficiency and a reduction in medical errors.

Because of this innovative move, ROI has impacted the System of Mercy Healthcare System with the avoidance of nearly 178,000 potential medication errors per year and 17,000 potential cases of adverse drug effects that actually harm patients-a shattering set of statistics that are common to the national healthcare sphere. The bottom line is that Mercy Meds is all about patient safety.

The investment has paid off. As a result, MERCY ROI netted its 19-hospital parent company Sisters of Mercy Health System in St. Louis $15.7 million in benefits last year in operational improvements. But beyond fiscal improvements, the benefits in patient care have not gone unrecognized. Recently, MERCY ROI has been asked by other healthcare organizations to facilitate in establishing similar models nationwide as a progressive leader in protecting our most valuable asset-human lives!

» Read the full article from Global Logistics & Supply Chain Strategies magazine, December 2006 issue, here (793Kb)

For More Information

Kimberly Nichols
(760) 360-7295