In a 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 decisions1. 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. One of the top barriers identified was the lack of accurate, evidence-based data to make more informed purchasing decisions. The supply chain and perioperative leaders met to discuss how to overcome the barrier. Here’s a summary of their findings:
- 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.
Collaboration is the key to driving supply costs down while refocuses clinician time back to patient care. A lack of collaboration needlessly drives supply costs up while taking time and attention away from patient care. By using data for decision making, clinicians and supply chain professionals can work together to overcome their top barriers and create a more clinically integrated supply chain.
To optimize your supply chain, explore these resources, insights and services.
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