Clinicians have always been suspicious of supply chain professionals because they believe we are irresponsible cost cutters and therefore not sensitive to their problems, concerns, and challenges. As you know, this attitude couldn’t be further from the truth. Yet, as supply chain professionals you must understand this perception if you are to win over clinicians in your healthcare organization’s battle to reduce costs and improve quality. With this said, here are three ways you can reinvent your clinical supply integration for better results:
3 Ways To Reinvent Clinical Supply Integration
1. Provide Insightful Data at Point-of-Care Where Value Is Created or Lost: It is worthless for supply chain to generate supply utilization data and then not share it with your front-line clinical department heads and managers. This is where your clinical departments can have the most impact at their point-of-care! For instance, one of our clients reduced their nursing unit supply expense budgets by 11% to 23% without handholding by sharing their supply utilization data on a monthly basis. It was just that easy to reduce their costs!
2. Providing Intuitive Data is The Answer to Reducing Your Clinical Supply Costs: Right now, your clinicians are receiving comprehensive data on their labor cost to manage this expense driver effectively but are receiving little or nothing on their supply expenses, except for budget variances. If you take a look at your healthcare organization’s budget variance reports, they only tell part of the story. A clinician could be within their budget parameters, but still spending way too much on their supplies. This is where comparative KPIs can make the difference in ratcheting down your clinical supply costs. Otherwise, how would you know that your clinical supply costs are out of step with your peers?
3. Empower Your Clinicians With Visual Data They Can Understand and Then Act On: 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 to stick. Our clients have discovered that change is much easier if you provide your clinicians with data visualization (i.e., graphs, charts, trends, etc.) they can understand that gives control back to their hands, with the result that clinicians are more accommodating to changing their products and technologies because it was their own decision to do so. This reduces everyone’s stress during the clinical supply integration process!
Better Results With Clinical Supply Integration
We are all looking for ways to become more clinically integrated with our supply chain operations for better results. As outlined above, sometimes that means providing your clinicians with the tools, training, and support to make the savings happen in their own time and on their own terms. That’s how you move your healthcare organization to the next level of savings performance by sharing the responsibility of savings money and improving quality with your clinical staff who are actually very motivated to do so.
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4 Ways You Can Use KPIs To Move The Needle On Your Supply Chain Expense Savings Reductions
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