The typical procedural area in a medium or large hospital spends hours per week generating the daily re-order list of their important supplies and implants. The typical procedural area, like a Cath Lab, EP Lab, Vascular Operating Room or Interventional Radiology Department, spends those hours doing manual, inexact tasks such as “eyeballing” inventory to find missing items or filling out requisitions based on their best guess of what supplies are needed. This process has been in place for decades at most hospitals, but technology is now available to replace this manual work that currently requires thousands of dollars of labor per week to complete.
This new category of technology allows procedural areas to completely automate the re-ordering and inventory management processes for their expensive supplies and implants. Systems like iRISupply use RFID technology to create a just-in-time, perpetual inventory management system for procedural areas. The technology removes manual counting or data entry from the daily re-order process and allows clinicians and techs to turn their time spent on inventory management back into time spent on patient care.
These RFID-based systems use smart cabinets to keep an accurate, real-time count of inventory to create a perpetual inventory system. Once per day, the system creates an automatically generated order that replenishes all inventory to the PAR levels set in the system. This just-in-time inventory system allows for all items to be kept at the appropriate levels needed by the department – no more, no less. The built-in analytics even learn a department’s needs over time and recommend updates to PAR levels based on item usage trends over time. The system can help save hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars by clearing unneeded inventory off of the shelves.
Completing an interface between an inventory management system like iRISupply and a hospital’s materials management system can create even more efficiencies for the procedural areas. By having a bi-directional interface between the two systems, iRISupply can automatically send the re-order list to the materials management system to completely remove the human element from the daily re-order process. At an administrator’s option, the daily re-order can still be manually checked and adjusted as needed based on the upcoming case load. Either way, an accurate, completely automated daily re-order is processed without spending countless hours putting together the re-order list and entering the requisitions manually.
Isn’t it time your hospital looked into joining countless other leading health systems that have already implemented such technologies in their procedural areas? Not only do these systems lead to reduced time spent on inventory management and re-ordering, but they also improve the accuracy of the re-order process and can save hundreds of thousands of dollars from reduced stock levels of expensive supplies and implants – a true win-win for all involved.