Your patients deserve effective clinician-supply chain collaboration

The way forward requires health systems to start moving beyond the traditional supply chain procure-to-pay paradigm and shifting to a more strategic, outcomes-based approach. This shift involves three essential requirements: 

• A solid data foundation: It’s no longer just about the item master. All data—item, vendor, transaction, and clinical data—must be integrated and easily available. 
• Modernized workflows: Smart business logic and streamlined processes maximize collaboration and empower your supply chain team to drive alignment with clinical decision makers. 
• Transparent measurement: Consistent, reliable tracking and reporting improves adherence to decisions and helps ensure you’re delivering the best care at the right cost.

Removing the barriers to a clinically integrated supply chain requires a commitment to next-generation processes and new-breed analytics. Whether it’s product standardization, clinical variation, optimizing contract utilization or shifting to cloud—you need a foundation of data that is unified, precise, current, always available, and evidence based. 

For example, migrating to a cloud ERP allows you to rethink the size of your item master, but it requires a new approach. A unified data strategy ensures these systems can dynamically consume the data required to support key business processes. It also normalizes bad and inaccurate data and creates alignment across the systems that provide or receive data to/from the EHR/ERP. 

Combining data from supply chain, EHR case record and independent clinical evidence provides service line leadership with data to better understand the intersection of physician choice, care variation and ultimately variation in outcomes. 

Gaining clarity on items attributes and relevant clinical evidence helps you understand the value of using a given product. Without the independent evidence, it is merely driven by clinician opinion.

The bottom line is that a clinically integrated supply chain supports a better and safer experience for each and every patient by lowering costs and improving outcomes.  

On average, supply chain costs make up about 33 percent of total hospital expenses, costs are inevitably passed along to the patient. By understanding all the various factors that go into providing care, by collecting and sharing accurate and timely quantity and cost information, and by ensure that clinicians and supply chain teams have access to integrated systems, data and processes, you will be taking huge strides in making care available and affordable to every single individual in your community.