The Driving Results Blog is a space for MedSpeed’s CEO, Jake Crampton, to share insights about a variety of healthcare topics. Occasionally, other members of the MedSpeed leadership team will use this space to discuss matters of particular importance to them.
MedSpeed has been serving, and a part of, the healthcare community for 20 years. We, like everyone in the industry, are immersed in the current population health crisis caused by the COVID-19 outbreak.
As our customers battle on the front lines of healthcare, we are doing everything we can to support them. Our operations teams and LSRs across the country are working in lock step with our customers to reposition protective equipment where it is needed most.
This week is Patient Safety Awareness Week. And as healthcare providers around the globe work to contain the coronavirus, it seems particularly important this year.
Patient Safety Awareness Week is recognized and promoted by some important organizations in healthcare: the American Society for Health Care Risk Management (ASHRM), the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
This year, MedSpeed will celebrate our 20-year anniversary. During these past 20 years, we have had the opportunity to work with many outstanding healthcare organizations and incredible, forward-thinking leadership teams who are all working together to transform the industry into something better, smarter and more efficient.
One of those customer organizations is OhioHealth, a not-for-profit health system that operates 12 acute-care hospitals and more than 200 outpatient sites, hospice, home health, medical equipment and other health care services over a 47-county area.
Transformation. Disruption. Words used to describe radical change.
These same terms have been bandied about to discuss what needs to happen to the American healthcare system; change that makes for a demanding proposition and one that will require continuous effort.
A recent Op/Ed in Modern Healthcare by Jonathan Manis, SVP and chief information officer for Irving, Texas-based Christus Health addresses healthcare’s incomplete progression toward transformation.
Patients are (and should be) the basis for everything we do in healthcare. But in some ways, that wasn’t always so.
Twenty-five years ago, John O’Malley created Patient Recognition Week—which falls in this first week in February. Healthcare worker O’Malley felt it was important to recognize the many patients that healthcare workers cared for. His goal was to ensure that patients were recognized as the single most important aspect of healthcare.
MedSpeed recently distributed a press release announcing our newly created chief information officer (CIO) role. Our new CIO, Jim Van Duyn, was promoted from within MedSpeed and is responsible for our company-wide IT strategy and management.
Over the years, Healthcare Purchasing News has examined freight and shipping. Recently, they took a look at intra-facility practices. I had the pleasure of being one of those interviewed for the article. Here are some outtakes from the article that not only spoke to what those organizations are doing, but how their approach is—in many ways—in sync with MedSpeed’s.
Third-party service companies can offer “a centralized view of same-day deliveries through systems, support and expertise that many healthcare networks lack internally,” noted Melissa Laber, general manager, OptiFreight Logistics, a Cardinal Health, Inc. company.
Why you can’t cost-cut your way to greatness
I write quite a bit about price versus value and how true partnerships look at overall value received in order to benefit both organizations. When both parties invest in improving and innovating the process and work collaboratively to develop the right cost structure, everyone can end up a winner. As Kate Vitasek notes In one of her recent posts, “Avoiding the Death Spiral,” “you simply cannot cost-cut your way to greatness.”
Recently, I had the opportunity to record a webcast for the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM) about how strategic same day transportation, what we call intra-company logistics, is the backbone of a successful healthcare supply chain.
I also had the opportunity to talk about why transforming healthcare is paramount to ensuring our organizations, patients & country thrive and how intra-company logistics can play an important role in the process of remaking our healthcare system.
You can watch the short (6-minute) webcast here: Intra-Company Logistics: The Backbone of Your Successful Supply Chain.
I had a great experience at last week’s Executive War College on Lab and Pathology Management, highlighted by the opportunity to moderate a panel about next-level logistics infrastructure that enable the lab of the future.
During the session, Aaron Maixner, operations administrator for the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic Health System; Khosrow Shotorbani, the executive director, founder and chief executive officer of Lab 2.0 Strategic Services; and Sam Terese, chief executive officer and president of Alverno Laboratories covered how their logistics networks have advanced with their lab’s growth and improve operational efficiency and patient care. Some key outtakes of that discussion included: