O.R. Supply Chain: Garbage In, Garbage Out!

To modernize, hospitals have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on electronic healthcare record (EHR) and enterprise management software over the past decade or so.  Correctly presented as an investment in the future, it is a necessary expenditure to improve efficiencies and lower costs in delivering quality healthcare to everyone.

Outside of labor costs, the biggest expense in delivering healthcare is delivering the products used in administering healthcare - the supply chain.  While complex and affected by challenges unique to care of life, the business software investments involving the supply chain center on challenges such as inventory management, cost containment/value assessment tools, and timely delivery of the right products at the right time.  It is a complex and delicate mission-critical dance.

For the second biggest profit center in hospitals, however, it is often horribly compromised.

As with any series of connected segments, a supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  A compromise in any of the links affects the overall strength of the chain.  For the operating room supply chain, the weakest link is the one often hidden to business operations personnel - at point of use during surgery, where products are used.  The process for tracking items used during an operative procedure is often entirely manual, characterized by pens, papers, stickers, 2 or 3 manual data entry steps, and telephone calls.  It is often highly error prone and incredibly inefficient.

The key to any efficient supply chain is to track usage via scanning at point of use.  Every department in the hospital utilizes this technology, from central supply to the pharmacy.  Every department, that is, except the operating room.   It is estimated that over 90% of hospitals are recording surgical item usage manually during surgery.  Why care?  It drives cost: OR products are famously expensive - think of 150 dollars for a bone screw that costs 4 dollars to manufacture. We all pay for that.

And most of that expensive fancy software to manage inventory, costs, and delivery for the OR supply chain?  It is compromised, as the manual tracking on the front end leads to boated inventory, expired product, and higher costs for pretty much everything that is used in surgery.  As with any closed, data-centric system, it is garbage in, garbage out.

It doesn’t have to be this way anymore.  Summate Technologies has developed the world’s first roll-in solution that offers true point of use scanning for any operating room.  Summate’s SMARTtable replaces the current surgical back table, and scans items at actual usage location: at both edge of and inside the sterile field.  And the SMARTtable can transfer usage data without requiring a complex and time-consuming data integration.  We put hospitals instantly on the road to a more efficient operating room supply chain and deliver out of the box value without large upfront costs or process disruption.  Every day without a SMARTtable is a day of lost profit for an O.R.

It’s time for healthcare, and operating rooms, to put Scan in the Plan with Summate Technologies.