Combining interoperability and analytics to improve healthcare supply chain efficiency

Historically, hospital inventory management and supply chain systems have been disjointed from the electronic health record (EHR). This causes a lack of clarity regarding supply expiration facts, location of items, and outdated lists or counts of supplies.

Surgeons may not have the items they need at the time of surgery, so they call supply chain managers requesting the item, which in turn may cause rescheduling or cancellation of surgeries. And in this scenario, there’s no information getting back to the supply chain managers for them to use to improve the situation.

It’s time to figure out how to improve supply chain efficiency by leveraging innovations in interoperability and analytics. This report examines how hospital data, information, communications, and analysis of physician orders in EHR and supply preferences translate to efficient supply chain processes.