Healthcare, Posts
Physician Preference Best Practices to Reduce Healthcare Supply Chain Costs
Understanding the true cost of care delivery has long been an elusive goal for hospital leaders. This is especially true for the perioperative space, which is both the greatest revenue generator and highest area of healthcare supply chain costs for most organizations. With surgeons each choosing their own high-cost supplies, such as hip or knee…
Healthcare, Posts
Are We Ready to Deliver the COVID-19 Vaccine?
Is the supply chain ready to deliver COVID-19 vaccines? The supporting technology exists and the resources are in place, but now that the vaccine is available, it's up to the logisticians to connect those dots from end to end.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Do You Have Confidence in Your Hospital Inventory Management Data?
To gain comprehensive control of your supply chain, pinpoint your hospital inventory management issues and where there are gaps in your processes and data.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
How to Achieve Patient-centric Healthcare Supply Chain Management
Discover the three things that need to happen in order to achieve patient-centric healthcare supply chain management at your facility.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Healthcare Inventory Management: Three Ways to Address Supply Hoarding
The challenge for supply chain leaders is to build trust among clinicians. Here are three ways to leverage technology and automated processes to improve healthcare inventory management and gain clinician confidence.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
3 Symptoms of an Unhealthy Healthcare Supply Chain Strategy
For many executives the COVID-19 pandemic revealed cracks, gaps, and in some cases chasms, in their healthcare supply chain strategy, with vast shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies. While it took a pandemic to highlight these issues, they have in fact been plaguing the industry for quite some time in terms of…
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
The Journey to a Healthcare Consolidated Service Center
The dire shortage of critical medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic shined a massive spotlight on the need for healthcare providers to take control of their own supply chains rather than rely on third-party service providers or distributors. Supply chain professionals across the globe competing all at once to source products from suppliers, mostly based…
Healthcare, Posts
Three Post-COVID-19 Outcomes Likely to Impact the Healthcare Industry
Six months ago, news of Trump’s possible impeachment, nestled between Epstein’s death and Weinstein’s conviction, held mindshare. Headlines included WeWork laying off workers and musings on a new IPO called Zoom. On April 20, oil dropped to less than $0 per barrel and Zoom’s stock more than doubled in value. A new concept of the…
Healthcare, Posts
How Healthcare Is Managing Unpredictability
Health systems are flexing their emergency preparedness muscles like never before. The unpredictability and power of COVID-19 is slowly unveiling which hospitals are prepared to manage a major epidemic. Although every health system conducts emergency preparedness training year-round, each organization builds a unique culture and strategy that works best for their organization. At Tecsys,…
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
4 Ways to Reduce Hospital Supply Chain Waste
Clinical supply waste is a significant, and growing, financial and environmental challenge in healthcare. Hospitals must implement programs to reduce overall waste while finding cost-effective treatment and disposal methods of their non-regulated and regulated medical waste.
Healthcare, Posts
Budget-friendly Tech Tools for Your Healthcare Storeroom or Warehouse
When tasked with designing/redesigning a storeroom or warehouse within the confines of a very tight budget, it’s oftentimes difficult to decide which technology tools to implement or ignore. Have no fear because there are solutions that will help make product flow more effectively, efficiently, fast and seamless — without breaking the bank.
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts
Perioperative Analytics: Exploratory Data Analysis in the OR (Part 4 of 4)
I am now entering the final phase of this blog series, in which I am delving into the analytics of knee replacements at one hospital. You can access the first three posts in this series here: part 1, part 2, part 3. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg to the Rescue Leonard Euler’s 1736 paper on…
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts
Perioperative Analytics: Exploratory Data Analysis in the OR (Part 3 of 4)
After having painstakingly gone through all the legal, procedural, and data engineering pain points that I described earlier, I now have in my possession a data set from a hospital system that I can eagerly sink my exploratory analytics teeth into. The data, which is now ingested, formatted, prepared, cleansed, combined, scaled, and loaded in…
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
The Value of Operating Room Inventory Supply Management
The topic of operating room supply management and point of use capture in the OR continues to be an important one as healthcare organizations look to improve supply chain visibility and reduce costs. Recently, I had a good discussion with Stephanie Mittler, Senior Clinical Consultant at Mercy Hospital Washington as well as a former OR…
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts
Perioperative Analytics: Exploratory Data Analysis in the OR (Part 2 of 4)
In part 1 of this four-part blog series, I invited you, the reader, to join me on a data-driven journey: Exploratory Analysis and Discovery in the OR. The goal was to discover whether there were any business process insights that may be leveraged from the hospital supply chain at the point of use. I also…
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
3 Myths About Hospital Inventory Management
Health systems looking to control costs while strengthening patient care often struggle to bring lasting change to hospital supply chains with complex requirements.
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts
Perioperative Analytics: Exploratory Data Analysis in the OR (Part 1 of 4)
The vast swathes of data being collected in modern health systems suggest that perioperative analytics (or OR analytics) are at the ready. The truth is that extracting meaningful information from all those data points takes some coordination and a little exploration. Let's take a look at the exploratory data analysis that underscores analytics, and the different 'flavors' of perioperative analytics, from descriptive and diagnostic to predictive and prescriptive.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
5 Perspectives on the Clinically Integrated Supply Chain
When addressing supply chain integration, we are inherently talking about connecting the traditionally disconnected, and it becomes a complicated—and often messy—state of affairs.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
It’s Time to Transform the Healthcare Supply Chain
Transformation is a disruptive undertaking, but the risks and opportunities within the IDN Supply Chain warrant a closer look into a health system's nextgen supply chain readiness.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Closing the Operational Gaps Between Clinical and Supply Chain in Healthcare
It’s an interesting time in the healthcare industry, and for the supply chain specifically. Each of the following market factors is thrusting the supply chain to center stage and calling on all of us to up our game in the face of more complex operations. These factors include:
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Healthcare Supply Chain Embraces E-commerce Trends
Historically, the margins in this specialized industry have compensated for lack of advanced healthcare supply chain capabilities. Now, though, the industry is no longer standing still due to the increasing pressures on margins, traceability and customer demands.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Healthcare and Cloud: What a Difference Two Years Makes!
I recently wrote an article for Becker’s Hospital Review Health IT & CIO Report titled “Offloading IT Headaches to the Cloud is a Win for Healthcare”. It is remarkable how far we have come in the last two years. If I would have written this article then, it might have been titled "Overcoming the Fear of Cloud in Healthcare", because not too long ago, the benefits enabled by cloud technology were also shrouded in fears over perceived security risks; concerns such as "Where's my data?", "Can someone steal it?", "How do I know it is safe?".
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Demand Planning and Forecasting, Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Supply Chain and Finance: Shared Metrics Drive Business Success
In the January-March 2018 issue of APICS magazine, APICS CEO Abe Eshkenazi contends that if supply chain leaders bring business success then that makes them business leaders. Mr. Eshkenazi goes on to state “organizations that consider their supply chains as strategic and competitive assets outperform the market”.
Demand Planning and Forecasting, Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Moving Stuff Back Up The Supply Chain
There has been a lot of focus on optimizing the supply chain for order fulfillment. The on-going efforts to perfect the ‘order to cash’ process have yielded great rewards. But what about returns? Automation has reduced the number of returns due to errors however the world must move from a linear to a more circular economy and this will impact the entire supply chain.
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain, Warehouse Management
Competing on Data Talent
In my last post, I introduced the longitudinal study that MIT Sloan Management Review has been conducting over the past five years. From 2010 to 2012 they indicated that 67% of those surveyed believed that analytics gave their organizations a competitive edge. In 2013, that figure stabilized at 66% revealing the so called 'Moneyball Effect' where leaders lost their competitive edge that they once enjoyed because followers matured and made analytics core competencies. In 2014, that trend continued, falling to 61%.
Analytics, Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
About Forecastability
Forecastability is an important word in demand planning. Oddly, the word forecastability is not listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary nor is it found in Wikipedia. However Wiktionary describes forecastability as “A measure of the degree to which something may be forecast with accuracy”. That something could be an item used in the production of a finished good or the finished good itself.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain, Warehouse Management
What defines BIG thinking?
In the movie Big, Tom Hanks plays a child trapped in the body of a 30-year-old who challenges the status quo at a toy manufacturer. To the audience it all makes sense as the movie progresses – think like a kid when selling stuff to kids. How revolutionary! Yet the audience also relates to the adults who pretend to know what kids like.
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain, Warehouse Management
Big Data – Synthesis
In 2013, Gartner conducted a survey on Big Data Adoption in Supply Chain Industries and found that adoption has been flat and is lagging behind the overall adoption rate of other industries such as banking, insurance, and retail to name a few. Gartner ascertained that these characteristics pertaining to the Supply Chain industry are attributable to an inherent lack of understanding of what Big Data truly is and a fundamental lack of the required skill sets. This, in essence, is the challenge facing the Supply Chain industry.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Supply Chain Visibility at Becker’s Annual Meeting
The recent Becker’s Hospital Review Annual meeting in Chicago was invigorating and thought-provoking, with many presentations from CEOs of many leading healthcare systems. I wanted to share an overview of three breakout sessions that spoke specifically to Healthcare Supply Chain.
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
The Hierarchy of Healthcare Supply Chain Metrics
In my July post, I introduced the 'Hierarchy of Supply Chain Metrics', which is a framework of supply chain metrics conceived by Gartner, the world's leading information research and advisory company. The model provides 3 tiers of integrated metrics to assess, diagnose, and correct supply chain performance, and is a great example of what constititutes a supply chain scorecard.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain, Warehouse Management
“Business As Usual” is not the future of healthcare supply chain!
Isn’t this the most interesting time in US healthcare? Actually, in healthcare across the globe? Because no matter how your healthcare system is funded, the containment and management of supply chain costs is a constant business reality we are all facing. To that end, supply chain is finally coming into its own in the C-Suite of most organizations. We are realizing, as an industry, that what has worked in the past will no longer work in our emerging reality — on all sides of the business equation. Everyone has to participate in the change.
Analytics, Business Intelligence, Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
3 Stages of Hospital Supply Chain Management (SCM) Maturity
Having been involved in the development of a pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record, I have a keen interest in how healthcare benefits from standardized policies and technologies designed to reduce healthcare costs and improve patient outcomes and safety through improved synergies and efficiencies. My interest also extends to the hospital supply chain. With inventories representing 30% of hospital costs, second only to labor costs, there are huge gains in organizational performance that can be had through better supply chain management.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain, Warehouse Management
Trends Are In the Air
Tecsys-Sponsored a Lunch & Learn program at the recent IDN Summit, “The Transformable Supply Chain” featuring Brent Johnson, Chief Procurement Officer, Intermountain Healthcare; Curtis Dudley, Vice President of Integrated Performance Solutions, Mercy; and Mike Wentling, Chief Solutions Officer, ROi. The discussion focused on the changes in the healthcare supply chain that have driven the development of consolidated service centers/supply chain centers.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Reading to Think: Concepts in Healthcare Supply Chain Management
I would like to share some reading I have been doing that is providing a lot of food for thought. The first source is the book “Healthcare Will Not Reform Itself” by George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente. What a compelling read! Mr. Halvorson walks us through many scenarios, while breaking things down to accessible portions.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
What the C-Suite Needs to Know about US Healthcare
I recently had the opportunity to hear a presentation by Brandi Greenberg, Managing Director at The Advisory Board and the Healthcare Supplier/Provider Institute in Las Vegas. Brandi presented research findings that are packaged for the C-Suite. I found it very enlightening and wanted to share my notes with you.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain, Warehouse Management
Healthcare Self-Distribution: Early Considerations
We recently hosted a web event titled Demystifying Demand Planning: WHY and received an interesting question from one of the participants. The question had a much broader reach than Demand Planning and I thought it would be terrific to share it with all of you.
Healthcare, Posts, Supply Chain
Establish Trust via Demand Planning
Trust. Hard to gain, easy to lose, and widely discussed in supply chain management in healthcare. Typically, trust is limited, and the lack of it is limiting our ability to work together. So how do we, as supply chain participants, create it? The answer is multifactorial; however, one key component is communication. An easy channel for communication is data and metrics, and heaven knows we have data!
