As we have acknowledged in a previous e-newsletter, our definition of clinical supply integration is “giving control of your healthcare organization’s supply chain expenses to the people who have the most influence over it – your clinicians.” With this said, here are three ways we have found to improve your clinical supply integration for better, longer-lasting results:
Improve Your Clinical Supply Integration
1. Provide Intuitive Expense Data To Front Line Clinicians. Right now, at most hospitals, clinicians are receiving in-depth data on their labor cost to manage this cost driver effectively, but they are receiving little or nothing on their supply expenses, except their budget supplies variances. If you have ever seen budget variance reports, you know they only tell part of the story. A clinician could be within their budget parameters, but still be spending way too much on their supplies. This can all change for the better if you provide, as we have for many hospitals, timely and intuitive supply expense trending and benchmarking reports that are actionable.
2. Empower Your Clinicians To Control Their Own Expenses. As you know, very few clinical supplies and technologies are changed without the agreement of your clinicians. The reason for this is that any clinical change must be owned by these same individuals. Empower your clinicians to control their own supply expenses with the result that they will be more accepting to changing their products, services, and technologies, when necessary, because it was their own decision to do so.
3. Celebrate and Report Successes To Senior Management. The most successful clinical integration initiatives we have seen have celebrated and reported their success to their senior management. One hospital that we worked with had their nursing staff develop storyboards of their successes and presented them to their senior management upon completing their projects. This celebration of success created enthusiasm for the initiatives and recognition for those clinicians for the hard work that was put into each and every savings project.
Managing Expenses
Supply chain and value analysis managers have been doing a good job on holding the line on their costs. Yet, it has been our experience that when clinicians can see the data for themselves that specific product, service, or technology costs under their control are beyond acceptable limits, they take corrective action. This will help supply chain and value analysis professionals share the workload of effectively controlling and managing their non-labor expenses.
P.S. If you are interested in seeing our Clinical Supply Integration Management System in action that will increase your savings yields by 7% to 15%, just sign up for a FREE “test drive”.
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