If you can name a hospital, system, or IDN that doesn’t need to rein in their expenses in 2022, we would like to remind them that cost is our enemy and they must always be on the attack. Inflation was 6.8% in 2021 and growing. If you ignore this fact, it could be dangerous to the bottom line. To help you with this challenge, here are five healthcare supply chain best practices to reduce your supply spend in 2022:
5 Healthcare Supply Chain Best Practices to Reduce Your Supply Spend in 2022
1. Throwing a Blanket Over Everything and Tracking It All. Yes, you are spending millions of dollars every year on your supply and purchased services contracts that are very time consuming to manage. Add in new product requests and value analysis GPO contract conversions and you have got your hands full. But that does not mean that you can’t keep track of everything that is going on in your supply chain and knock out some low hanging fruit – beyond price. First, you must know where to look. Second, it needs to be a sure thing. That’s why you need to employ a volume centric reporting system to alert you to big areas of savings that you can find some easy wins with that will not take a lot of your supply chain team’s time. Once you do this, you will wonder why you hadn’t done it sooner!
2. Deploying a Clinical Integration Supply Chain Program. Everyone has clinical integration as part of their strategic healthcare supply chain plans for 2022 and beyond, but it is not just adding more physicians or clinicians to your VA teams and calling it clinical integration. We have found that the best way to truly effect clinical integration is to work on the supply costs on a unit, department, or division level, or per case if in the surgery suite. This then further engages the clinicians on a whole new level of savings with their own departmental evidence in the form of departmental usage by unit patient day, ED visit, etc. Once upon a time, we thought the clinicians would totally reject the unit/departmental/division reports/reviews but instead they embraced them. One client even wrote a book about this for Magnet.
3. Reinventing and Reenergizing Your Current Value Analysis Program. Most healthcare organizations haven’t reached their full potential with their value analysis programs. This is because their VA practitioners have been focused on price as opposed to performing functional analysis on the commodities their healthcare organization is buying. This one technique can up your VA program’s savings by 5% to 7% – almost overnight.
4. Establishing a Clinical Supply Utilization Management Value Analysis Team. All healthcare organizations have ratcheted down their commodities’ prices. Yet, these same organizations have left their back door open on utilization misalignments. To close the door tight, forward thinking healthcare organizations are establishing CSUM programs to shave 7% to 15% off their supply chain expense budgets.
5. Reining In Purchased Service Contract Expenditures. Although this is a supply chain best practice, it isn’t a universal best practice. In 2022, why not close this gap so you can experience 11% to 18% savings just waiting to be harvested. We have the documentation to prove it!
Multiple Double-Digit Savings Opportunities
Although supply chain expense price savings are at historical low levels, there are still multiple double-digit savings opportunities as outlined above that are available to progressive healthcare supply chain professionals. Why not make 2022 the year that you investigate them?
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