June 14

The Key to Understanding Your Hospital’s Supply Utilization Savings and Quality Opportunities

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I can’t tell you how often we share supply utilization data with healthcare organizations and they don’t know what to do with it. That’s why we also teach hospitals, systems, and IDNs how to interpret, understand, and then analyze their supply utilization data. We make the information meaningful, intuitive, and actionable so that they can apply this knowledge to save money or improve quality.

The Science Behind Your Supply Utilization Data

You can have the cleanest, error-free data in the world, but without the knowledge to understand the nuances of your supply utilization data it is worthless. It is really a science to understand your supply utilization data gradations, let alone understanding your savings or quality improvement opportunities. To that end, here are three tips on how to make your supply utilization data more meaningful, intuitive, and actionable:

  • Employ visuals (graphs and charts) in displaying your data. This technique will enable you to quickly see favorable and unfavorable patterns and trends that have developed in your data. Dry statistical data alone just doesn’t come alive enough to be meaningful and memorable to your department heads and managers.
  • Use year-over-year data comparisons to flush out wide variations in your products, services, and technologies’ utilization. We just performed this study for a number of clients and found that the total impact of viewing one year’s worth of data all at one time is very instructive.
  • Utilize peer benchmarks to tease out hidden savings and quality opportunities. With our Utilizer Systems we report out to our clients how they can use historical benchmarks to validate savings and quality improvement opportunities internally, but there is no better way to uncover hidden savings and quality opportunities than employing peer benchmarks.  For instance, if you are using 3x the number of cardiac catheters than your peers (volume adjusted) then you have a savings opportunity that you would never know about without peer benchmarks.

The science of supply utilization management is the systematic study of the behavior of your end users through statistics, analytics, and observations. This can best be performed with data visualization, year-to-year comparisons, and peer benchmarks.

Becoming a Black Belt in Supply Utilization is Like Becoming Sherlock Holmes

Becoming a black belt in supply utilization management is like transforming yourself into Sherlock Holmes, the legendary fictional English detective of books and movies. All of Holmes’ famous cases were solved with basic science, his insatiable curiosity, and keen process of deduction. It’s the same with supply utilization management. You need to use science, curiosity, and deduction to understand your data and then apply that knowledge to changing the behavior of your department heads and managers to save money and improve quality.


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healthcare, healthcare organizations, hospitals, IDNs, savings, supply utilization, supply utilization management, utilization, utilization data, Utilizer


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