Over the past 30 years, hospitals have been adopting technologies to steadily increase process automation throughout their operations in an effort to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. It began in the 1980s with the initial use of mainframes and desktop computers for electronic patient registration, continued through the late 1990s with “Best of Breed” systems, such as materials management information systems (MMIS) for order processing and inventory management, and then transitioned in the early 2000s to present day with the adoption of on-premise (“on-prem”) enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that automated both materials management and financial operations.

By now, most of the U.S. has sent their children back to school. The tradition of returning to school is an exciting time for many students but not for all. It can be uncomfortable or intimidating to show up without the same supplies, or any supplies, as their other classmates.

In order to take advantage of geographic synergies or fill gaps in capabilities, healthcare providers are building strategic portfolios through mergers and acquisitions. As new locations and facilities are added to their health system, along with legacy processes and technologies, there is no shortage of change management planning needed. For vendor credentialing, where each location may have unique facility access requirements and visibility into vendor compliance is critical, technology that scales smoothly right along with growth of your health system takes on critical importance.

The benefits of electronic trading are well established, but for many healthcare manufacturers and distributors electronic data interchange (EDI) has competed with other priorities as the overhead and resources needed to implement and maintain systems can be significant. However, the growth that both manufacturers and healthcare organizations are now experiencing has intensified the importance and urgency to reduce manual processes and ramp efficiency and accuracy with automation.

With the shift to value-based healthcare fully underway, we are not seeing a slow-down in mergers and acquisitions. This has become a favored way to build on financial, clinical and operational synergies, extend care to a broader geographic area and mitigate declining reimbursements. According to the Q2 report from KaufmanHall¹, the first half of 2019 is tracking in line with 2018 transaction activity for the same time period.

The UDI rule published in 2013 was intended in part to both accelerate and provide a more efficient means of resolution to device recalls. In the final rule, the economic analysis specifically identified as one of the benefits the potential to “more effectively target and manage medical device recalls”. Yet now, even with a rise in medical device recalls, and the fact that many healthcare providers and manufacturers have incorporated UDIs into internal systems, the use of identifiers for the purpose of recall management remains low.