We can all stumble over supply utilization savings from time to time, such as, wasted exam gloves due to faulty glove dispensers, but to have an effective system to continuously identify and eliminate your supply utilization misalignments (UM) requires these four key components:
Eliminate Healthcare Supply Utilization Misalignments
1. Establish a Baseline or Starting Point Used for Comparison of Usage. Put simply, you must know where you stand today with the utilization of products, services, and technologies to be able to compare it to future usages. Thereby, being able to identify changes in your utilization over time.
2. Triangulate Your KPIs To Ensure Your Assumptions Are Accurate. To confirm that your UM assumptions are accurate, we recommend that you include these three measurements: Historical, comparative, and year-over-year key performance indicators.
3. Visualize Your Data To Enhance Your Customers’ Acceptance Of Your Facts, Figures, and Numbers. Nothing brings your conclusions to life better than a graphic representation of your data. This is because raw statistics are hard to comprehend for most of your customers. As explained by David McCandless, “By visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a sort of information map. And when you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.”
4. Coach Your Customers In The Elimination of Their Utilization Misalignments. It is important that you coach, teach, and instruct your customers how to eliminate their utilization misalignments, since they will feel more comfortable doing so with your guiding hand. Otherwise, they will resist making the changes that are necessary to reduce the waste and inefficiencies in their supply streams.
The Only Place to Go for Savings
Now that your price savings are disappearing and standardization is substantially completed, the only place to go for savings is supply utilization management. That’s why these four SUM success factors should be important to you.
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