One thing that is certain in the current economy is inflation. Your healthcare organization will now need to accelerate their cost management transformation. The answer to this challenge is to radically reinvent what you have been doing as a healthcare supply chain manager in these four areas of operations:
Reinvent Your Cost Management Efforts
1. Benchmark everything you are doing to ensure you are a peak performer in all categories of your supply chain operations (i.e., price, standardization, value analysis, staffing, efficiency, effectiveness, defects, etc.).
2. Take control of your healthcare organization’s purchased services rather than continuing to leave this responsibility to your department heads who aren’t trained or motivated to obtain the best outcomes for your hospital, system, or IDN.
3. Investigate your utilization misalignments since these are the new low hanging fruit that could save millions for your healthcare organization.
4. Initiate a top down approach to reducing your PPI cost, since a bottom up approach generally only nibbles around the edges of your PPI costs.
Be Proactive in Cost Management
If you follow the course of action outlined above to reduce your supply chain operation’s cost structure, you will be ahead of the cost curve that your healthcare organization will require to survive the effects of inflation.
On the other hand, if you decide to wait to be told by your senior management to cut your costs almost overnight, you will be disappointed, upset, and bewildered with the results of this directive, since your senior management will always demand more cuts (sometimes arbitrarily) than you think they should. So, make it a practice not to be reactive to change; always be proactive to change or this will be the scenario you will face.