Earn Their Trust and Let Nurses be Nurses

This week is National Nurses Week, and it’s important to recognize the invaluable role nurses play in American hospitals and how we as an industry can maximize their impact on patient care. Nurses are on the frontline of healthcare, ensuring patients receive consistent attention and high-quality care. But when nurses end up responsible for “below license” tasks like placing supply orders, checking inventory and moving supplies, a hospital’s most important talent assets are diverted away from patient care.

At MedSpeed, we know that supply chain shouldn’t be a nurse’s job. By ensuring items are delivered on time and stocked in the right quantities, we help hospitals build trust with their nurses. When nurses trust their supply chain, they’re less likely to resort to habits like hoarding or overordering just to ensure adequate supplies for their patients. Building trust among nurses enables them to do the jobs they’re intended to do, which leads to higher satisfaction for staff and patients.

Here is my full blog post on this subject on Modern Healthcare.

in Blog / Care Quality / Deliver Better Care / Operational Efficiency 0 comments

Intra-Company Logistics: It’s More Than Getting from Point A to Point B

By Wes Crampton, Chief Operating Officer, MedSpeed

Increasingly, providers are re-thinking healthcare transportation because a single delivery delay, a mishandled specimen or a missed delivery can be costly in terms of actual dollars, impact to the patient experience and market reputation. Such errors are estimated to cost providers an average of $600-700 per error (or more). With an industry average of 500 to 1000 errors per million stops, errors can cost providers hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Shameless plug: MedSpeed’s error rate is only 38 errors per million stops).

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The Importance of the Supply Chain and Healthcare’s Quadruple Aim

As healthcare continues to march towards value-based care the importance of an efficient healthcare supply chain grows. Not too long ago, the supply chain was all too-often viewed as a transactional process. We at MedSpeed know that the transactional view of the supply was shortsighted. A recent article in Becker’s Hospital Review confirms that the supply chain “is [now] considered a core competency for hospitals to reduce waste and lower costs, while supporting patient care initiatives.”

Supply chain and supply chain leaders are now included in C-suite discussions, and for good reason: Reducing inefficiencies in the supply chain helps organizations focus more on patient care.

According to Peter Mallow, PhD, program director of health economics, market access and reimbursement for Cardinal Health, supply chain leaders have evolved into enablers with a greater focus on patient experience because instead of simply moving things from A to B, supply chain is looking to ensure that they’re improving—not adding complexity to—the job of clinicians.

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New Survey Links Supply Chain Management to Better Quality and Patient Care

Historically, supply chain management has struggled to get the attention it merits. Over the years, it has been increasing in importance and a recent industry survey supports this increased focus.

The survey highlights opportunities for improvement and modernization in supply chain management. Most importantly, in my opinion, it found that outdated and manual healthcare supply chain management processes detract from care delivery. Frontline clinicians said that they spend a full two hours per 12 hour shift managing inventory issues. Nearly two-thirds of those frontline clinicians said they wish they could trade the time they spend managing supply chain for more patient care time.

in Blog / Deliver Better Care / Hidden Waste / Supply Chain 0 comments

There Is No “I” in Team: The Value of We

As they say, “There is no ‘I’ in team.”

A recent post in H&HN entitled “Creating a Culture of ‘We’ Leads to Health Care Value,” addressed this very point. The author, Jack McNamara, points out that in healthcare today, there is an overarching strategic imperative to develop and embed a culture of value throughout the enterprise. And who does that include?

It should include everyone. The concept of the “mutuality of interests,” developed nearly 100 years ago by sociologist and theorist Mary Parker Follett, states that this mutuality is built not on the Golden Rule, but on the principal that when those working together share the same interests, the quality of work improves, and there is less waste.

in Blog / Deliver Better Care / Improving Patient Care / Quality 0 comments

Supply Chain: Essential to Improve Patient Outcomes

Clinical improvements—the key to making patient interactions widely successful—“requires getting the right products, services and capabilities into the hands of clinicians and the supply chain is essential in driving scalable, sustainable improvements in the health care system,” said a recent article in H&HN.

Recognizing the supply chain’s importance in overall success as an organization can lead to widespread benefits within healthcare. When organizations are looking for ways to make clinical improvements, it makes sense to involve supply chain early in the process because it “can expedite the adoption of meaningful medical advancements for better patient care.”

in Blog / Care Coordination / Deliver Better Care 0 comments

Why Questioning the Status Quo Builds Better Leaders to “Think Different”

There’s a post that I read a while back on Inc. that keeps coming back to me. “Why Great Leaders Question the Status Quo: Being a thoughtful, creative leader means moving beyond the confines of tradition,” was written by Micah Solomon.

We all know of great thinkers and business leaders who question the status quo, and Solomon cites the late Steve Jobs of Apple as a prime example. The indelibly memorable “Think Different” advertising campaign that helped bring Apple back from the brink in 1997 completely highlighted the fact that Apple products and its leader were different from the rest of the world.

in Blog / Deliver Better Care / Future of Healthcare / Healthcare Innovation 1 comments

Thoughts from the recent IDN Summit in Phoenix

I just returned from the Fall 2011 IDN Summit in Phoenix and I came away feeling pleasantly (hopefully not delusionally!) optimistic about where healthcare is headed. Why? I think that the industry is showing one of the most positive signs of human nature, that at a certain point people simply reject negativism. In fact, studies have shown that one of the causes of the business cycle – in this case the upswing portion – comes from people’s collective unwillingness to indefinitely dwell in the doldrums. The result — a challenge, once feared, becomes something to overcome. It sure felt that way in Phoenix!