When clinical and supply chain teams have competing priorities and don’t communicate effectively, the resulting supply chain challenges can lead to frustration and impact patient outcomes.
Solving this misalignment is no longer optional, as a lack of collaboration needlessly drives supply costs up while taking time and attention away from patient care.
What can clinicians and supply chain professionals do to work as a team and overcome these challenges? In a supply chain survey1 305 stakeholders weighed in—including OR nurses, OR supply chain decision makers and hospital supply chain leaders.
In the survey, 42 percent of surgeons and nurses said, “Saving money helps all of us.” Seventy-seven percent said that the same or even better care is possible while reducing costs at the same time. And 77 percent of OR clinicians want more input into inventory management decisions.
If clinicians want to be part of the solution and agree that reducing costs won’t impact patient care, then why is a clinically-integrated supply chain so hard to achieve? To get to the answer, Cardinal Health assembled VPs of Supply Chain and OR Directors from various hospitals and health systems. Before meeting as a group, they were asked:
- What are the key barriers to creating a clinically-integrated supply chain?
- What is preventing you from overcoming these barriers?
- What are some potential ways to address these barriers?
- What are examples of best practices that have created an efficient, clinically-integrated supply chain?
- How was this clinically integrated supply chain established? Were any of the key barriers in place—and how were they overcome?
The top barriers identified were 1) working within silos and 2) a lack of accurate, evidence-based data to make more informed purchasing decisions. Next, the supply chain and perioperative leaders met in person to discuss how to overcome these barriers. Here’s a summary of their findings.
1. Remove silos
- Reduce product variability: Introduced by both supply chain professionals and new physicians, this variability can be addressed via a well-defined collaboration between the hospital’s value analysis committee and physicians.
- Align priorities and goals: When they compete, priorities and goals can create even deeper silos. To overcome the challenge, up front communications can demonstrate the value of getting all stakeholders on the same page. For example, how does saving money benefit everyone?
- Present relevant data: What’s the key to effectively integrating clinical and supply chain teams? The common denominator is evidence-based data that supports efficient, safe and quality care.
2. Use accurate data to improve decision making
- Integrate IT systems: A significant barrier is no interface between IT systems or too many systems overall. If integrating systems isn’t possible, find the “one source of truth” within your data.
- Start with standardization: Work together to define opportunities for standardizing products and saving money, while maintaining clinical quality. Then identify evidence-based clinical data that make the case for implementing these changes.
- Align goals: Clinical and supply chain teams all have the same objective: to improve the quality of patient care. But when clinical and supply chain goals are misaligned, change is difficult if not impossible. For example, an OR Director may be tasked with increasing the surgical case load. But if the supply team doesn’t have a plan for ensuring continuity of supply at higher surgical volumes, then the growth strategy may be handicapped.
It takes teamwork to achieve a clinically integrated supply chain. The desire among clinicians and supply chain professionals is there, and stronger communication is the first step.
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1About Cardinal Health Hospital Supply Chain Survey
This study was fielded Nov. 2 - Nov. 15, 2017, using an online survey methodology. The samples were drawn from SERMO’s Online Respondent Panel of Health Care Providers, which includes over 600,000 medical professionals in the United States. The study included 305 respondents total from health care organizations varying in size, specialty and practice area. Respondents included frontline clinicians (n=128), operating room supply chain decision-makers (n=100), and hospital/supply chain administrators (n=77). All survey data is on file at Cardinal Health