All healthcare supply chain departments have accumulated voluminous amounts of data. However, this data, by and of itself, doesn’t provide solutions for your hospital’s supply chain expense management reduction efforts. Only by organizing it and combining it with financial and clinical data and then measuring and interpreting it can you have actionable results!
Reduce Your Healthcare Supply Chain Expenses
Then, and only then, will you have data rich enough to understand your customers’ behavior, habits, and patterns that will lead you to new thinking about how to reduce your supply chain expenses. We aren’t talking about price benchmarks here, but value analysis analytics that will guarantee you success in the healthcare supply chain expense management game.
By actionable we mean that you can do something with the data that you are analyzing. If you see that your wound care costs have doubled while your census is down by 7%, it’s time to investigate what’s going on in this category of purchase. Or, if you see that your surgeons are consistently implanting the highest cost pacemakers in your formula, you can bet that they are overspending in this physician preference item (PPI) group.
More importantly, you need to benchmark your utilization practices against your peers. Why? This is the only way to know with certainty if your product, service, or technology costs are best in class or are in need of major adjustments. This kind information cannot be attained through intuition, guessing, or gut feel. You must authenticate this information with comparative peer data. There are no exceptions to this rule!
Improve the Quality of Your Hospital’s Supply Chain Data
We now have extremely powerful technology to help us drive our supply chain expense management decisions. Yet, the quality (i.e., intuitive, perceptive, predictive, and actionable) of our data needs to be greatly improved at most healthcare organizations before we, as an industry, can reach the next level of supply chain expense management performance.
It all starts by looking beyond the bits and bytes of your data and then asking the question, “What can my data tell me about my supply chain expenses that I don’t already know?” By answering this question, you will be well on your way to revamping your data sets to give you those actionable results that will lead you to new thinking, strategies, and tactics on how to rein in your hospital’s supply chain expenses.
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