No One Benchmark, Statistic, or Metric Tells the Whole Story
Healthcare supply chain analytics is becoming even more mission critical each year, since our price savings are marginal at best. Therefore, we as an industry need to identify those hidden savings beyond price in our supply streams to continue to contribute to our healthcare organization’s bottom line. Yet, we have discovered that one benchmark, statistic, or metric doesn’t tell the whole story to enable our clients to convince their process owners that their supply spend is high in a category of purchase and then start a dialog on how to reduce it.
Triangulate Your Supply Analysis for Superior Results
We have found it is much better to triangulate our clients’ supply chain analytics to provide a more detailed story on why a category of spend is high and then begin a discussion on how to lower this expense. It has been our clients’ experience that this is how you win over your process owners to make changes in their operations, not by showing just one benchmark, statistic, or metric that is meaningless to them.
For instance, if we identified for a client that one of their catheter kits was running 26% or $36,322 higher than our benchmark for a given period, we would also want to have them show their process owners that their historical standard (four quarter average metric) and their budget category variance is also extremely high. This way, you can demonstrate to your process owners that something has changed from the beginning of the period under review. Because of this tactic, our clients rarely have a dispute with their process owners. Instead, this data piques their interest on what is going on with this utilization misalignment.
Your Data Must Tell a Story to be Convincing
Your data, statistics, and analytics are worthless unless they result in positive change. That’s why your data must tell a story to be convincing. For instance, if you showed a head nurse of a nursing unit that her patients are utilizing 9.5 washcloths per patient stay, do you think this would get the head nurse’s attention? You bet it would!
Further, this statistic could mean that patients or staff are pilfering or trashing the washcloths. This is the investigation that should follow once the head nurse sees that something is going on with his or her washcloths. But this won’t happen unless your data tells a story that is convincing.