In honor of the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management’s (AHRMM) annual National Health Care Supply Chain Week (October 3-9, 2021), we are proud to recognize several healthcare supply chain professionals who exemplify an exceptional commitment to collaboration, improving patient care and innovation.
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Jennifer Williams, GHX Director of Market Development & Education, Credentialing
Until recently, almost anyone could enter a hospital or physician’s office with relative ease. Facilities were designed to allow access. Today, while many professional office buildings require check-in and access badges, countless healthcare facilities have not adopted safety protocols to this degree. But that’s changing and for good reason.
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Whitney St. Pierre, Executive Director, Product Marketing
Supplies follow a long pathway through the hospital, from the warehouse to the clinical care team. As a critical end user, nurses have unique visibility into supply chain inefficiencies and problems. This is one of many reasons it’s so critical for hospital leaders to incorporate nurses’ input before embarking on a supply chain improvement initiative. Nurses can reveal key supply chain vulnerabilities and weaknesses that other hospital staff members don’t see.
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Suzanne Smith, Solution Advisor, Lumere
When Value Analysis Director Kristin Sinke joined Michigan-based Spectrum Health in 2017, the value analysis team for the 14-hospital system consisted of herself and one other person. Within two years, she had helped create a completely centralized program comprising 14 full-time employees (FTEs), and in March 2021, the team launched its first strategic outcomes-based partnership with Medtronic, a global leader in medical technology.
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Lee Smith, DHA, MBA, BSN, RNFA, Chief Nursing Officer, Syft, a GHX company
As the conduit between patients and care, nurses have many critical responsibilities. One of the many tasks in a nurse’s day is properly documenting supplies, however, for many nurses, this is laborious and time consuming. In fact, a recent survey of 100 hospital nurses and frontline leaders found that more than 85% have difficulty documenting supplies used during procedures.
Read MoreInventory services are about much more than just accurate hospital inventory counts.
A healthy supply chain starts with an accurate inventory. That's why so many hospitals rely on GHX Inventory Services to provide point-in-time inventory for year-end, mid-year, and baseline reporting. In the last decade alone, this team has conducted nearly 8,000 inventory counts, totaling almost $13 billion in inventory.
Read MoreHospital inventory counts may reveal compliance and safety problems.
The inventory count team performs nearly 800 inventory counts at healthcare facilities every year. While conducting an accurate count is the primary objective, this work often unearths critical pieces of information for hospitals. In two cases, that information related to safety and compliance problems associated with controlled substances.
Read MoreAt GHX, we know the business of healthcare continues to evolve, driving critical changes in how data is used to advance clinical, financial and operational performance. Data show continued strong interest in making the move to value-based care, defined by the outcomes that matter to patients relative to the cost of delivering those outcomes. At the same time, many organizations say the transition to a system that rewards value, not the volume of services delivered, is moving too slowly, hampered by the silos that hold us back from collaborating effectively to deliver optimum patient care.
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Pete Nelson, General Manager, Global Alliances
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.
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