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Increasing federal regulation compliance costs and declining reimbursements have compressed hospital profitability. This is leading hospitals to turn to Supply Chain to reduce direct costs for supplies, devices, drugs, and purchased services. Traditionally Supply Chain has aggressively pursued these cost reductions through price reduction tactics. These techniques, however, are yielding diminishing savings returns.

Introduction Healthcare provider stakeholders, including physicians, clinicians and supply chain professionals utilize data to make procurement decisions for medical devices to ensure and improve patient access to high quality devices. The integrity of these decisions depends upon the accuracy and completeness of the underlying data. There are three (3) significant challenges to accurate and complete data on medical device quality:

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This paper describes the development of a multidisciplinary and innovative product conversion process at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, when the existing process for changing products was dysfunctional.

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The Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM) of the American Hospital Association (AHA) has named Christopher J. O’Connor, FACHE, CMRP, FAHRMM the recipient of the 2016 George R. Gossett Leadership Award. Download the Full Press Release  

In 2016, AHRMM convened the AHRMM CQO Task Force, a group of healthcare leaders collaborating to identify real world examples of supply chain’s alignment with the Triple Aim. The IHI Triple Aim framework was developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Massachusetts to describe an approach to optimizing health system performance (www.ihi.org).

AHRMM is offering a repository for leading and proven supply chain practices, case studies, and toolkits that are developed from a Cost, Quality, and Outcomes (CQO) perspective. The following CQO leading practice describes methods used to reduce costs, enhance patient care quality, and drive greater financial outcomes through blood product and service optimization, and was submitted by:

AHRMM is building a repository for leading and proven supply chain practices, case studies, and toolkits that are developed from a Cost, Quality, and Outcomes (CQO) perspective. The following leading practice was submitted by:

This paper explores nine different methods of replenishing a hospital storage area and compares and contrasts the steps nursing must progress through to retrieve the supplies they need for their patients.  

The Purpose of this white paper is to prepare Supply Chain professionals to better understand how to support navigating some of the risks and opportunities inherent in participating in the 340B Drug Discount Program.

Medical device manufacturers have been working hard to comply with the new Unique Device Identification (UDI) regulations from the FDA that are aimed at bolstering the safety of medical devices. The UDI system, which the agency says will be phased in over several years, is intended to improve patient safety, modernize device post-market surveillance, and facilitate medical device innovation. The FDA program leverages human and machine-readable UDI labeling for identifying medical devices, and device labelers must submit information about each device to the FDA’s Global UDI Database.

Healthcare reform is driving unprecedented changes in the management, funding and delivery of care as hospitals develop and implement strategies to achieve higher quality care at lower cost. The problem many hospitals face involves the gaps in data between costly supplies, and how they are managed in the item master and chargemaster. Having links and systems in place to audit and validate the item to charge accuracy is crucial. Without this foundation, providers lose the ability to trust their physician quality outcome assessments and episodic care analytics.

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When I started in supply chain, the position that was presented afforded me the opportunity to utilize my clinical and business skills with the goal to maximize relationships that I had cultivated over the years as a critical care nurse and leader. Healthcare was going through a transformative change with the introduction of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) and managed care impacting the way hospitals and ultimately physicians would be paid. The job description was for a clinical resource manager—a novel concept at the time.

HealthTrust recently created the Physician Advisors Program, which is narrowing the chasm between those who purchase products and those who use them. The program solicits physicians’ input on clinical evidence reviews in product categories that have a significant impact on patient care, specifically physician preference items (PPI). Download Article

The evolution of our healthcare system from a volume-based to a value-based model is driving provider organizations to adopt patient-centric, outcomes-based success metrics for operational processes in both acute and non-acute settings. Download Article