I hope you realize that technology is the enabler for growth, consistency and compliance in your healthcare supply chain business. I my opinion, you can’t grow your supply chain business without mastering the human as well as the technical side of technology. This is because people, not machines make technology work to its full capabilities. Here are three tips on the human factors (that change behavior) that are essential to grow your supply chain technology’s capabilities:
- Connect Technology To Hospital Supply Business Priorities: It’s not enough to buy new technology, it must connect to your healthcare organization’s goals and objectives to be a motivating factor for your employees to use it properly. For instance, if your organization’s goal is to cut their supply utilization cost by 5% to 7% this fiscal year, then it will make sense to employ utilization analytics software to uncover these hidden savings.
- Embed It Into Your Day-To-Day Supply Chain Processes: Don’t priorities the use of technology just because it’s simple to implement to embed it into your day-to-day processes, like value analysis where your employees can see how it will make your VA process hyper efficient. The more technological successes you have will help you to convince your supply chain staff that technology does make their jobs faster, better and easier.
- Focus On Increasing Your People’s Capability for Using It: Your employees need to understand the benefits to them of employing new technology if they are going to utilize the technology to its fullest capabilities. Some of the benefits could be reduction in their stress levels or lessening the feeling of being overwhelmed by their workload and helping them become more effective and efficient in their job.
Healthcare Supply Chain Technology is here to stay and will become even more sophisticated with artificial intelligence. However, this doesn’t change the human factor or changing people’s behavior or how they do things. Change is never easy, and technology changes are even more difficult because they aren’t simple, easy or welcomed by all. This doesn’t mean we can avoid new technology; it just means we need to get better at the human side of technology to be successful. (Source: TargetMarketingMag.com)