Supply Chain Management in Healthcare Industry

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• Supply Chain Management in Healthcare Industry

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Supply Chain Management in Healthcare Industry
As an overall business arm of the vastly spread
medical industry in the United States, Healthcare
Supply Chain Management is basically a series of
processes and workforce involved across different
teams and movement of drugs, surgical equipment,
and medical billing and coding procedures as
needed by healthcare professionals to do their
job. The importance of supply chain management
in healthcare is to look out for vulnerabilities
among sections and propose measures to reduce
them. The objective is to identify weak areas to
achieve targeted health outcome and increases
investments in global health. The positives of
efficient supply chain in the healthcare industry
is improved processes, effective utilization of
resources, gratified employees, active treatment,
happy patients, and most vitally and streamline
income cycle in the form of timely
reimbursement. The significance supply chain
helps facilities analyze possible loopholes in
the healthcare and recommended controls which can
be useful practically so as to bring improvement
in the healthcare. In hospitals an incorporated
supply chain should be executed to meet the
objectives, as it ensures proper linkage of the
various hospitals departments, operations and
revenue cycle management. The supply chain can be
envisaged as a back end program running which is
necessary to integrate all the different
processes together. Once the supply chain
management is implemented, it ensures
availability of medicine/drugs at right time,
lowering the inventory wastage, maximizing
patient care, coordination in all departments,
and minimizing medical billing and coding errors.
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Supply Chain Management in Healthcare Industry
Is healthcare supply chain management complex? On
the outset, healthcare supply chain management is
complex as well as unique because each
stakeholder has their own interests to protect.
Different stages in the management flow may be
focused on their own goal. Insurance providers
would want to use a specific product because they
were trained at it, whereas hospital staff aims
to purchase the most affordable quality items.
Since supply chain goals are not always
affiliated within an organization, the supply
chain management process can be disorganized and
fragmented. Healthcare facilities must take into
consideration numerous requests and viewpoints to
settle on specific product budgets. However,
patients also have a voice in this supply chain
management process. For instance, healthcare
facilities may be able to regularly order the
correct sizes of gloves and keep them stocked,
but there are patients who need more customized
medical products, like the latex-free options,
depending on their health status. Similarly,
providers may favor a specific brand or type of
medical product, which could lead to cost
concerns. Supply Chain Management and the future
of Healthcare A healthcare system that delivers
the right product at the right time and place can
become reality, if all the stages in the
healthcare cycle are well defined. But for this
to happen providers must work meticulously to
develop the core competencies required to make
accurate assessments about inventory and avert
spending increases that occur with little to no
justification.
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Supply Chain Management in Healthcare Industry
Sustained investment in automation and medical
data analytics, as well as a push towards greater
data transparency and reliance on more
streamlined standards in the field of revenue
cycle management and medical billing will help to
mend broken supply chain links. Healthcare
organizations are now realizing that greater
alignment of revenue cycle management and
clinical data systems may help deliver high
quality, low cost care. A combined revenue cycle
management and supply chain approach may amplify
claims management process and reimbursement
accuracy and make cost-to-charge data capture
more seamless than before. As providers
tentatively put more and more of their income
cycle at risk through value-based contracting,
they must redefine their supply chain management
primacies to ensure that they can influence new
technologies to cut extraneous costs. Lastly,
to succeed in this new period of healthcare
reform, healthcare leaders should evaluate their
supply chain management actions, consider the
procurement of analytics tools, and prepare for a
future in which every dollar, along with every
box of medicine/drugs can be tracked, managed,
and used effectively.
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