Improving Efficiency and Business Performance

Meridian Health Resources, a significantly growing health system in New Jersey, needed to streamline its core accounting processes and eliminate inefficiencies while continuing to grow and provide quality care to patients.

Do you spend hours every week managing the intraocular lens (IOL) inventory at your eye center? Anna Conley, Ambulatory Surgery Center Purchasing Agent at Cincinnati Eye Institute, and Olivia Uptergrove, Clinical Director of the Eye Surgery Center of North Dallas, discuss how McKesson Implant Manager helped automate IOL processes at their respective facilities.

In many respects, the non-acute world is different than the acute-care environment in which most supply chain executives built their careers. But it turns out that the tools those executives perfected in the hospital are similar to those they will need to service non-acute sites. When it comes to navigating the non-acute supply chain, the same rule applies as in the hospital setting: listen to your clinicians.

Faced with the challenge of managing supply chain for two acute-care medical centers, 35 non-acute-care physician offices and several urgent care facilities, Stephanie Hunt, director of materials management for Lake Health, explored how centralizing purchasing medical-surgical supplies and pharmaceuticals could help create efficiencies across these multiple sites.

Healthcare’s C-level leaders are under immense pressure to improve operational efficiency and maintain their organizations’ bottom lines amid some challenging industry dynamics, including regulatory uncertainty, declining reimbursement and rising expenses. At the same time, financial incentives to keep patients out of the hospital and healthcare consumers’ increasing demand for convenience are pushing more care toward lower cost, non-acute environments, such as physician’s offices and urgent care centers.

As health systems grow, the likelihood of obtaining non-acute-care sites also grows. For supply chain executives, who likely learned their craft in the acute care environment, these non-acute sites of care can represent new challenges. Supply chain leaders for Einstein Health Network discuss the benefits of automation in tackling these challenges.

Healthcare is changing, and supply chain’s role is changing along with it. During AHRMM 18, McKesson hosted the Supply Chain Leadership Forum during which supply chain leaders discussed four factors for supply chain success throughout the care continuum.

As healthcare continues to experience a seismic shift from inpatient to outpatient care, health systems are investing heavily in acquiring ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) or building new centers from the ground up, requiring health systems to reevaluate their ASC strategy. With this growth comes increased competition, and health systems are re-engineering their ambulatory strategy to ensure success in this market.

As your health system integrates to a value-based approach, laboratory testing can play an important role, an efficiently-run laboratory care management program in each of your facilities can help improve patient outcomes. It can be a challenge, however, to identify lab needs at the various points of care.

Patients are looking for radical convenience. How will health systems reinvent the continuum of care to meet patients’ changing preferences? Advisory Board recently interviewed ninety C-suite leaders from hospitals and health systems about their top five concerns.

As the industry shifts from inpatient to outpatient care amid the transition from volume to value, health system executives are challenged to ensure patients receive care in the appropriate setting, while simultaneously working to improve the quality of services offered. Developing a strong ambulatory strategy is one way provider organizations can move closer to reaching these key objectives.