5 Tips to Enact Change Through Supply Chain Collaboration

• Stacey Breeden, Director, Business Development - Supplier Sales

Within many healthcare organizations, the supply chain department operates in a silo disengaged from frontline caregivers. In the case of McLeod Health, this led to $3.2 million a year in lost revenue as a result of not capturing product usage at the point of care. To address this issue, McLeod’s senior leadership assembled a multidisciplinary team comprising administration, clinical leaders, finance, information systems and procurement, to analyze supply chain processes, identify points of revenue leakage and put processes and systems in place to address them.

By working together, the McLeod transformation team gained visibility into lost revenue and put into place measures to address it, implemented operational improvements to streamline workflows and reduce waste, and transitioned from a manual to automated procure-to-pay process to reduce errors, contain costs and improve contract compliance.

Dale Locklair, Senior Vice President of Planning & Facilities Management Group at McLeod Health, offers the following tips to healthcare organizations wanting to enact change through supply chain collaboration:

1.  Make the Supply Chain a Strategic Imperative: Raise the profile of the supply chain’s role, positioning it as a strategic imperative for the financial health of the entire organization by bringing visibility to the financial impact of supply chain failure
2. Present Accurate and Credible Data: Leverage automation to establish a single source of truth for purchasing data that can be used to identify cost containment and savings opportunities
3. Establish a No Shame/No Blame Environment: Foster a culture in which errors are viewed as a system failure and not a people failure so that staff do not fear reprisal when revealing errors and discussing mistakes
4.   Cultivate Champions: To secure stakeholder buy-in, cultivate champions within departments to support frontline staff in their work and remove obstacles that hinder them from doing their work
5. Engage in a Continual Process of Improvement: Measure results, refine metrics and look for new opportunities to add value by eliminating waste

For more information, read the GHX white paper: Strategies for Healthcare Supply Chain Collaboration

Stacey Breeden

Director, Business Development - Supplier Sales