The emergence of new value-based care and payment models emphasizes the importance of collaboration between the clinical and supply chain leaders within your healthcare organization. Therefore, it is mission critical that supply chain leaders develop policies, procedures, and a system to do so. It’s no longer if, but when you will make this happen.
Supply Chain Begins and Ends with the Customer
You might not realize it, but your supply chain department exists solely to facilitate the actions of your clinicians, not to limit or control them. Only by collaborating with your clinical departments can you truly influence your clinicians to make positive change. This means you must impact their decisions at the point of service since that is where the value is created or lost in your healthcare organization. You might not be aware of it but 83% to 85% of your supply chain budget flows through these clinical portals.
Impact Clinicians’ Outcomes at Point of Service
Today, supply chain professionals are collaborating with their clinicians via their value analysis teams on new product, service, and technology introductions which is a good thing, but not good enough. To ensure that every product, service, and technology employed by your clinicians are at the lowest lifecycle cost they must have big data at their fingertips (i.e., utilization dashboard) to determine which of their products, services, and technologies are providing the best outcomes (e.g., cost, quality, and results) for their patients. For instance, if your clinicians can see they are using 2x, 3x, or 4x more dressing trays than their peers, this knowledge gives them the strongest motivation to modify their utilization behavior.
Supply Chain Managers Don’t Need to Do All of the Heavy Lifting
It’s been our clients’ experience that sometimes the best cost and quality managers at their healthcare organization are sitting in their clinical departments. This is because these clinicians understand the dynamics of their buying decisions when they see the results of their actions. Unfortunately, supply chain management is too far removed from the action to affect any long-lasting changes. Consequently, the new role of supply chain in this era of value-based purchasing is to provide your clinicians with this information, support, and coaching required to dynamically improve their cost and quality outcomes.