Just a few years ago, the only decision support tools available to healthcare supply chain professionals were spreadsheets and databases. The time has passed for these rudimentary tools since they don’t dig deep enough into your supply streams to help you identify and eliminate variations and anomalies in your supply chain expenses.
For instance, how would you know if you were reprocessing the optimal number of pulse oxisensors if you didn’t have a power tool* to automatically calculate and then benchmark your reprocessing patterns and practices? How would you know that your emergency department wasn’t reprocessing their oxisensors at all, or worse yet, were using high cost pediatric oxisensors on all their patients? That’s what the next generation supply chain power tool can do for you.
I was just talking to a supply chain professional who shares my point of view that having the right supply chain power tools can make your supply chain job a whole lot easier. He told me that he had been trying to use his surgical services information system (SSIS) to identify variations in his physicians’ practices but couldn’t obtain accurate information to compare his physicians’ protocols. He was hoping that our dashboard could sort out many of the questions he had about how his physicians practice, since his system couldn’t get the job done.
The point of this story is that high price information systems are too cumbersome and unwieldy to quickly hone in on the things that are most important to supply chain professionals. That’s why you need more than one power tool in your supply chain toolbox to assist you in answering your questions.
It’s the same with our software business. Our programmers employ many “off-the-shelf” power tools to get their programing jobs done. Yes, they could spend days or even weeks writing programs to do the same work, but why waste their time and money when someone else has already solved a particular problem that was bothersome?
Supply chain professionals should have this same attitude. If your systems aren’t getting the job done for you on price, standardization, and utilization, then you owe it to yourself and your healthcare organization to seek out the appropriate power tools that will give you the answers you have been searching for to reduce your supply chain expenses. It only makes good sense to do so!
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