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Ways to Optimize Healthcare Supply Chains in Healthcare

Health Care Financial Consultant healthcare supply chain

Optimizing the Healthcare Supply Chain

Optimizing the healthcare supply chain is crucial to ensuring patients receive high-quality care. While the healthcare supply chain has strict regulatory requirements, there are areas where it can improve. Enhance efficiency in the supply chain by following these hospital SCM tips:

Improve Visibility

You should be able to tell where products are within your supply chain at any given time and properly manage inventory. To do this, gather your data in a single location. This process includes data from manufacturing sites, distributors, suppliers, products, modes, customers and the like.

You will then need to improve your data analysis capabilities from end to end using software platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) or third- or fourth-party services.

Consolidate Your Supplier Base

Managing your suppliers is an easy way to optimize your healthcare supply chain. Consolidating suppliers can be simple if you:

Build partnerships with your suppliers that are a win-win for all parties.
Start retendering to improve your understanding of the market, improve supplier competitiveness and potentially build open contracts.
Conduct performance reviews on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis.

Center Performance

Define a hierarchy of meaningful outcome-based healthcare supply chain measures. These performance measurements should allow for analysis of the tradeoffs between key performance indicators (KPIs).

You can also create a KPI model focusing on the quality, service, costs and revenue of your entire supply chain. Target each part of the organization’s supply chain and capture real-time performance data.

Implement Standardization

Healthcare organizations often grow by acquiring other entities. This situation can result in all the separate systems and processes affecting one another.

Standardize processes for physical and financial elements using a framework like the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model. Doing so allows you to implement and enforce standards across all areas of the medical supply chain.

Know Your Costs

Many organizations would benefit from a greater understanding of their costs, including how much these are and where they come from. Start by collecting data about your costs of goods and services. Using standard categories, you can benchmark and assess the data and look for patterns.

Analyzing the invoice will help you determine where your cost-saving opportunities are. You can identify non-standard patterns and implement new processes that eliminate waste.

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