The latest research shows that as 2022 culminated, hospital gross operating revenues were down 1.2% year-over-year, while expenses were up 7.6%. As a result, more than 65% of hospitals were operating in the red. To address challenges such as inflation, supply chain shortages and other supply chain disruptions in 2023 and beyond, supply chain should focus on these six priorities of high reliability.
Realize savings by applying supply chain discipline to purchasing activity across every category of spend.
Broadening the span of supply chain control increases the percentage of an organization’s spend across all spend categories and purchase channels that are managed by its procurement department. This requires expanding the footprint of spend that is under the supply chain's responsibility and visibility while providing guidance in the sourcing phase to ensure a sustainable supply chain and ethical procurement with diversity, fair trade, price competition and compliance to purchasing policies.
Drive preferred purchasing behavior by informing and empowering requesters to make the best decisions.
Supply chain management in hospitals must direct preferred buying decisions on thousands of purchasing decisions being made every day, while at the same time helping requesters to feel empowered with information that they are making the best choices for a compliant supply chain.
Enforce compliance from the front end of the procurement process and orchestrate demand in response to disruptions.
Rigid formulary control entails both standardization in supply chain management as well as the standardization of suppliers, items and prices to ensure coverage across the demand footprint while limiting rogue options and centralizing all purchasing channels. Control the front end of the procurement lifecycle to ensure all items are approved for use and purchased from the right source at the contracted price.
Ensure the accuracy and completeness of the data by improving master data management workstreams.
The supply chain is the entry point for data flowing into and between internal and external stakeholders, so the supply chain is the gatekeeper to ensure integrity and interoperability of item and price data. Data integrity is strengthened by improving master data management workstreams – such as item adds, edits and deletes – to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the data. Operational efficiencies are gained through end-to-end integration of the data and by enforcing data quality across the transaction lifecycle.
Leverage technology to enable the flow of data across the supply chain ecosystem.
Given the volume and velocity of change in healthcare data, it must be connected from a single source of truth. It is important to keep data agnostic and autonomous between the data publisher and subscriber. Operational efficiency is gained through the interoperability of supply chain data between external partners and internal clinical, financial, and operational systems. Leverage software for supply chain automation to enable the flow of data across these organizational and system boundaries.
Provide actionable decision support by engaging organizational participation to achieve performance objectives.
Being data-driven means that the supply chain engages organizational participation in the actions it needs to drive to achieve the performance objectives it sets. This includes increasing stakeholder visibility to drive performance improvements and engaging those who are – both positively and negatively – impacting operations based on valid data-driven evidence.
Harness the power of one GHX platform and direct the future of your supply chain from the front-end
Linking Marketplace's front-end, directed buying experience with GHX's industry-leading platform and its collection of enriched and validated supply chain data will allow healthcare providers to better identify opportunities to increase financial control, reduce supply chain costs, eliminate waste and improve contract compliance.