The Business of Surgery

Hospital Supplies– A $23 Billion Savings Opportunity?

A recent study by Navigant Consulting concluded that the average hospital could achieve supply savings of nearly $10 million annually, or 17.8%, by pursuing some basic strategic initiatives.  With hospital margins often hovering near breakeven, that is an additional $10 million in savings that can flow directly to the bottom line. The other key finding […]

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How to Set a Consignment Strategy

Consignment items have been a frequent subject of conversations we have with inventory managers in procedural areas of hospitals.  Many hospitals that we’ve visited have a mix of consigned and owned products in their inventory. However, when you dig deeper you’ll find that many supplies were added to inventory as consigned or owned for inconsistent

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How Much Is Consignment Costing Your Hospital?

In a walkthrough of a major academic hospital in the Northeast US, the Chief of Surgery was lamenting how little space she had for new operations. The new hybrid Operating Room she was planning was going to be larger than their typical OR, making the issues even worse. As we walked through the ORs, a

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Do You Hear Too Many Footsteps?

Today, most hospitals are starting to understand what items and supplies they use by looking at data coming out of their documentation or materials management systems.  Maybe they even go a step further to standardize on certain products (it seems like every hospital has a “Product Standardization Committee” and/or “Value Analysis Committee”). But does your

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Minimizing Patient Risk Through Automated Inventory Management

For those directly involved with patient care, supply management for patient procedures or risk assessment, how does your team effectively manage the inventory of implantable items that are about to expire? Or more importantly, the items that are already expired? When we look at how the procedure areas in hospitals – ORs, Interventional Radiology, Cath

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The Importance of a Supply Chain Technology Strategy For Hospitals

The US Healthcare system lags behind the rest of American industries when it comes to using their supply chains as a competitive advantage.  Looking at Amazon, and its strategic use of its supply chain as a primary competitive advantage, highlights the differences between other industries and healthcare.  Amazon has invested billions of dollars to build

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Supply Chain Efficiencies and Process Redesign Top Survey of Cost Containment Strategies

Purchasing and supply chain efficiencies continue to be viewed as the primary ways to drive cost savings at hospitals. This is according to the recent survey titled 2017 HealthLeaders Media Cost and Revenue Strategies: The Need for Transparency and Understanding True Costs. According to the survey, respondents aren’t seeing any signs of diminished returns from

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View From the C-Suite: There’s No Money in Linens

I visited a top academic hospital in the United States today. Working with the Chair of one of the departments, he provided an insight I hadn’t really heard of before. This addresses many of the management ideas that we have all learned about – setting priorities (as opposed to trying to do everything), the 80/20

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How Massachusetts General Hospital Re-Captured $1 Million in Missing Revenue

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Boston-based, #3 ranked hospital according to US News and World Report, has successfully deployed RFID-based technology from Mobile Aspects to automate charge capture and inventory management across its procedural areas. MGH performs about 650,000 radiology examinations annually, and the Interventional Radiology (IR) department carries out around 15,500 procedures. In 2001,

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