Acute care patients require immediate treatment for injuries or other urgent medical conditions, sometimes resulting in emergency surgeries or extended stays in an intensive care unit.
Due to the urgent nature of this market, it is vital that Integrated Delivery Networks (IDNs), Health Systems, and local hospitals are able to rely on the support and service of their supply chain logistics partner. Ensuring that you have the right products, at the right time is a crucial part of a distributor’s role in the supply chain; in turn, making it possible for you to deliver the highest quality of care at all times.
In order for the supply chain to run most efficiently, logistics partners have developed supply chain programs that assist with a variety of pain points. However, these programs differ from one acute care facility to another for a wide variety of reasons.
So, how do you measure success from one program to another? Below are five key elements to consider:
- Reducing Touchpoints within the Supply Chain
- Product Standardization and Category Consolidation
- Contract and Pricing Accuracy
- Electronic Transmission
- Invoice Transparency
These five factors play critical roles in whether or not a program can create a positive impact on the efficiency of the supply chain.
Reducing Touchpoints within the Supply Chain
Looking to increase productivity and efficiency? The first step is analyzing your acute care ordering and stocking processes in order to reduce touchpoints. Each additional touchpoint reduces the efficiency of full time employees and increases the chance of products being damaged, misplaced or mis-stocked.
By reducing these touchpoints, facilities can streamline processes, increase productivity, reduce overhead expenses and decrease operational costs. Fewer touchpoints in a supply chain can create the efficiency essential to delivering the correct products for your patients in an instant.
Product Standardization and Category Consolidation
Consolidating product categories, reducing product variation within these categories and lowering the number of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) in stock can potentially improve care, increase operational efficiency and help cut costs. SKU reduction and product standardization improve patient care by increasing the usage of clinically approved products. Standardization also streamlines product application and increases efficiency.
Because of this, clinicians can focus on patient care as the use of the same products become routine, which subsequently eliminates product usage errors. Facilitating SKU rationalization similarly leads to increased contract penetration, reduced exposure to obsolescent or excess inventory and streamlined purchasing.
Contract and Pricing Accuracy
The healthcare industry is ever-changing; however, product pricing continues to be a consistent and prominent pain point for the care continuum. Gaining control of a facility’s pricing begins at the source of pricing – the contracts. Ensuring your supply chain partner is utilizing contracts accurately, in a way that gains the organization the best product pricing, can lead to a variety of benefits such as:
Reduced costs
- Improved payment terms
- Reduced invoice discrepancies
- Increased negotiating strength
Selecting a supply chain partner adept at managing accurate and up-to-date contracts provides a number of important benefits that can save you precious time and money.
Electronic Transmission
An enormous number of documents are processed within the healthcare industry every day – patient medical records, health insurance reimbursements, product pricing, rebates and contracts, among others. Using paper forms can be cumbersome, inefficient and expensive when analyzing, organizing and retrieving data.
The electronic transmission of information allows the exchange of computer-processable data in a standardized format for health systems. This enables healthcare providers to obtain information using a standard transaction set for organized and compliant data.
The use of electronic submission of data has many benefits including:
- Increased negotiating power
- Faster processing of information
- Improved payment terms and costs savings
- Improved productivity and reduced labor costs
In addition, acute and urgent care facilities can reap various benefits such as standardization, minimized transactions and improved productivity when their programs and solutions include electronic transmissions.
Transparency
The word “transparency” is now used more than ever before. Transparency exists to help drive true partnerships, leads to open and honest communications and allows for the exploration of new programs and solutions that bring the desired benefits to the customer. Transparency in healthcare is anything but new, but the idea is attracting more prominent attention from primary care providers, community health centers and government groups.
Approaching acute care by creating partnerships with customers based on flexibility and transparency enables a supply chain partner to drive the lowest total cost of ownership by optimizing product cost and ongoing process improvement throughout the customers’ unique supply chain models.
Concordance Healthcare Solutions provides transparent, unparalleled support and solutions for hospitals, health systems and IDNs. We are committed to delivering dynamic, dependable service that increases our customers’ efficiency throughout every level of the supply chain as we follow the patient’s journey through the care continuum. Click here to contact us to learn more.
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