Healthcare services across the globe came under significant stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. For once, collectively, the world realized the need and importance of quality healthcare for a broader population. And, while increasing the availability and access to healthcare, it’s becoming imperative to deliver quality care at an optimal cost. In certain countries and economies, optimizing healthcare costs have become imperative for many hospitals and physician practices, especially as payers start to tie claims reimbursement amounts to quality and cost performance. To be effective in terms of quality and cost performance, an optimized supply chain is essential. For healthcare, the supply chain is a complex and fragmented system: of processes, actors in the ecosystem, and incentive models. Managing such an ecosystem requires transparency across the value chain to bring in the required efficiency.
Each stakeholder in the ecosystem has its own incentives to protect, thereby, making the management of the supply chain challenges. Even within the provider ecosystem, the practitioners may want to use a specific product/solution as they would have been trained on it or been incentivized to use it, whereas hospital procurement executives aim to purchase the most affordable quality products or solutions. Since supply chain goals are not always aligned within a provider organization, the healthcare supply chain management process can often be inefficient and fragmented. Hence, healthcare organizations must take into account numerous such viewpoints to settle on a budget range for specific products or solutions.
Some healthcare organisations have found success with supply chain management through better planning and cost transparency. While harnessing price and utilization data, healthcare organizations can track and manage inventory more efficiently and construct more informed purchasing contracts with manufacturers and/or suppliers. When we have visibility of product from procurement to the use on the patient and we actually capture demand and consumption versus capturing purchasing activity, we capture consumption activity. With that information in real-time, we significantly reduce waste and variation in the supply chain. Inventory levels come down for everybody and, product expiration can be virtually eliminated.
The key to this implementation is to have all functions on the same connected system. Connected Planning is a new approach to business planning that enables dynamic, collaborative, and intelligent decision-making by incorporating all relevant information from across the organisation into a single cloud-based platform. A Connected Planning approach to supply network optimization means that all relevant data is modeled in a central platform, empowering businesses to make quicker, better informed, and collaborative decisions that outpace the competition.
In the era of value care, healthcare organizations are focused on reducing redundancies and eliminating waste, but providers also need to work together to effectively reduce costs and boost performance.
