Top 10 Tips for Hospital Inventory Management

Transcription

1 Top 10 Tips for Hospital Inventory Management

2 1. Focus on OR & Pharmacy: Hospital inventory, like many things in life, often follows an 80/20 rule. 80% of the value of your inventory will be composed of just 20% of your actual product and most of those valuable items - whether they be assets, med-surg supplies, consignments or medication - fall into the departments of OR or Pharmacy. Plan your inventory efforts accordingly. Spend 80% of your time and energy optimizing the ordering and organization of the equipment, supplies and pharmaceutical products in these categories. 2. Don t Forget Organization & Labeling: We recommend placing the most frequently used supplies in the most easily accessible locations. It helps to also label shelves carefully and always add new inventory to the back of the shelf to ensure the oldest product is used first. These few changes will enable your staff to find necessary items quicker and avoid having items wasted due to expiration. It is also important for hospitals to determine a few, centralized locations where inventory will be stored. If staff members have to travel far to pick up a frequently used item, chances are that they ll end up creating their own unofficial, mini storage sites, which can lead to inventory disorganization and count discrepancies. 3. Invest in Advanced Software: This is one of the easiest steps to take towards improving your hospital inventory management, but it is often the most overlooked. Hospital inventory is actually quite complex, so you ll be doing your facility a great service by investing in an inventory management and tracking software that can handle the specific needs of a business like yours. For example, the chosen software should be able to recognize and work with the over 150 bar code symbologies represented in hospital item masters. Also, be sure that it can effectively differentiate between issued and used units of measure. Check out point #10 to find out how Reliant can help you implement a software that can streamline the inventory process for your hospital.

3 4. Reconcile Data Entry: The point mentioned above brings us to this very important aspect of proper hospital inventory management. One of the main tripping points for many hospitals lies in determining proper of units of measure. The item data associated with medical gloves issued by a supplier may indicate that there was 1 box ordered and issued. However, within that box, 12 smaller boxes are the actual used units of measure for that product. Assign one point person per department who can coordinate with your Materials Manager to determine the appropriate and actual units of measure for your frequently ordered inventory items. Take the time to go through and reconcile any discrepancies in data entry in your system. This will eliminate future problems during inventory counts. 5. Simplify Supply Usage Documentation: As important as usage capture and documentation are to the efficient workings of any business - including and especially hospitals - many medical facilities struggle with this piece of the inventory management process. Your doctors and nurses are working hard to keep patients healthy and in the midst of hectic workdays and life and death situations, they often do not have time to fill out paperwork or submit documentation concerning supplies used. However, in order to properly bill insurance providers, complete medical records and update supply statuses, this is a necessary step. Therefore, implement a software that makes this part of the job as quick and painless as possible for your staff. 6. Simplify Supply Usage Documentation: Supply chain managers are the ones responsible for being up to date on the new versions of products and updated items that come out and are ready for ordering. But while they might manage the ordering of inventory, they are not the ones in the operating rooms and at the patients bedsides. In order to keep your Supply Chain Manager informed from a boots on the ground point of view, physicians should be allowed to offer input on product selection and preferred inventory. This will ensure that your hospital doesn t end up with a stock room full of new items that physicians don t actually prefer to use.

4 7. Help Your Staff Prioritize: First thing s first. Your staff need to understand just how fundamental inventory control truly is to your bottom line. The more effective they can be at helping keep tabs on inventory, the more money you ll save - which is better for them and for the hospital! More importantly, though, be sure to take into account that their primary job is caring for patients. Let them focus on what they do best by simplifying the inventory process as much as possible. Educate them on the cost of the items in your inventory so that they understand the importance of proper management, but don t ask too much from them (read our recommendation on this in point #10). 8. Complete Cycle Counts & Review Data: Outside of your yearly physical inventories, you should implement a schedule for cycle counting the various parts of your inventory throughout the year. Items that move through the supply chain quicker should be counted more frequently. These would include the highly consumable med-surg supplies. We recommend assigning one employee per department or per unit to be a dedicated cycle counter. This will allow that individual to become acquainted with your frequently ordered items and to develop expertise in the area of identifying and reconciling common discrepancies. Take the data collected from these frequent mini audits and put that information to use, generating reports and regularly reviewing them to observe trends in product costs and usage rates. This will help you to forecast accurately, order more efficiently and will improve your ability to plan for the future of your hospital. 9. Always Manual Confirm Pos: Your automated inventory management system should be able to track order receipts and invoices, but it never hurts to confirm that orders are accurate right when they come in. Avoid confusion with vendors - especially when dealing with consigned items - by checking the PO against the actual delivery of the products off the truck. This step only takes a few minutes and can save your hospital valuable time and money in the long run if you catch discrepancies in an order. It may not even be that an entire product is missing. It could simply be an error in quantity or type of product. These small errors may seem small and insignificant, but any little mishap in the ordering and delivery processes can results in major consequences for patients in the long run, so spend the extra few minutes manually verifying each PO.

5 10. Hire Professional Help: If you ve struggled to maintain proper inventory control in the past, chances are that you simply don t have the personnel or the tools to manage this process in-house. If that s the case, you re certainly not alone. In fact, most hospitals today are finally realizing that the task of completing a thorough, accurate physical inventory should not be a weekend job for nurses putting in a few overtime hours. That s why Reliant exists. We take all the stress out of inventory so you can focus on doing what you do best - running your hospital and caring for patients! We can implement the software you need to stream real-time data, increase charge capture and improve clinical documentation. Call us at Call Reliant Today at: