Excerpts from a Conversation with Intalere Senior Advisory Specialist, Tracey Chadwell In our previous post, we introduced the concept of supply chain resiliency, and shared insight on building your team and several strategies you can undertake as you move through the process. Now that we’ve got the team and we’ve got some of the strategy in place, what are some of the tools that are most important to implement to help you get ahead of the curve? What are some of the things that you can do in utilizing opportunities through the various partners on your stakeholder team? It’s very important to ..read more

Excerpts from a Conversation with Intalere Senior Advisory Specialist, Tracey Chadwell Supply chain resiliency is a term and phrase that has really gained traction over the past several months as we deal with the fallout of the pandemic and seek to apply some lessons and best practices so we can avoid making the same mistakes in the future. While the pandemic showed the importance of the supply chain, it also served in some ways to spotlight its weak links. In order to make the healthcare supply chain more resilient, we need to identify several components that are vital to its success. In bui ..read more

by Tracey Chadwell, Senior Director, Advisory Solutions, Intalere In recent blog posts, we discussed the idea of supply utilization management and building a sustainable process to identify gaps in supply chain strategies and create new behaviors that bring savings to your healthcare facility’s bottom line. One area of particular scrutiny is waste in the supply chain. Waste and inefficiencies in the consumption of products is where 79% of all new supply chain savings are hidden. That includes things like inferior products, value mismatches and misused, misapplied, or misappropriated products ..read more

By Peter Cayan, Vice President, and Tracey Chadwell, Senior Director, Advisory Solutions In part one of our supply utilization management discussion, we began by defining the concept of supply utilization management and explained how so many aspects beyond initial price affect your true cost. In this post, we’ll review how you can build a culture to achieve sustained improvement in support of the quadruple aim of improving patient outcomes, improving patient experience, improving care team experience and lowering the overall cost of care. An Intalere member at a regional medical center in th ..read more

By Peter Cayan, Vice President and Tracey Chadwell, Senior Director, Advisory Solutions While controlling cost and reducing variation will always be mission-critical functions to any and all supply chain managers, these tip-of-the-iceberg savings represent only about 37% of the total lifecycle cost of supply purchases. The preponderance of your product, service and technology life cycle costs, or 63%, is in your deployment and utilization, or how your commodities are employed by staff in your healthcare organization.  Total lifecycle management has a beginning, middle and end. At the beg ..read more

Tracey Chadwell By Tracey Chadwell, Senior Director, Medical Surgical Advisory Solutions In our last post, we introduced the idea and value of making supply chain a strategic function of your healthcare organization and shared the idea of a supply chain hierarchy, beginning with some important building blocks. Here, we progress further through the hierarchy, with advanced and graduate levels. Advanced Supply Chain – The advanced supply chain area takes a bit of a deeper dive into high impact areas of spend that include: Physician Preference Items – Many healthcare providers struggle to manage ..read more

Tracy Chadwell By Tracey Chadwell, Senior Director, Medical Surgical Advisory Solutions Today’s market dynamics have made supply chains extremely complex and planning more difficult. The COVID pandemic has led to an increased focus on the supply chain, which has resulted in healthcare organizations seeing the supply chain in a new light and recognizing the value of making this area a strategic function. One needs to look no further than the challenges of this past year, with the difficulties in getting PPE and other supplies, and now the complex distribution efforts around vaccine deployment ..read more

John Carmelite By John Carmelite, Vice President, Enterprise Applications, Intalere In our last post, we introduced the concept of automation for surgery centers and discussed adoption and how automation is helping to transform healthcare. Here we look specifically at the value automation can bring, including some successful use cases, and preview the next frontier in intelligent automation – chatbots. What Value Can RPA Bring to Organizations? In general, ASCs and any healthcare facility facing rising costs for patient and provider, siloed processes, numerous standard procedures across differ ..read more

By John Carmelite, Vice President, Enterprise Applications, Intalere The data and technology revolution has opened up a significant opportunity for innovation and advancement in many sectors including healthcare. One area of advancement that is ripe with possibilities is the ability to adapt intelligent automation into your processes. For many healthcare organizations, it may seem like a daunting (and expensive) undertaking. But you may be surprised to learn that automation initiatives can be undertaken and completed in a relatively short period of time at an investment level lower than you w ..read more

By Erika Johnson, National Director, ASC, Intalere From the apparent to the less obvious, what are 10 ways information technology (IT) can help an ASC or outpatient facility/department improve its supply chain operations? Most simply, software, through even a basic materials management information system (MMIS), can provide benchmarks and goals for organizations to use to reduce extreme variability in pricing in both commodities and implants. Data derived from an MMIS can also assist in: Aggregation – Systems can collect the proper data to aggregate spend across multiple facilities. Today, m ..read more