After discussing how rapidly U.S. health systems are changing and the demand of managing the supply chain amidst constant growth, the discussion moved on to another challenge faced by the supply chain leaders who participated in the discussion: that they, like most organizations, do not even know where to begin to truly understand healthcare transportation costs.
What our supply chain leaders said, in their own words:
“Those in the C-Suite don’t understand the dollars because it’s out of sight, out of mind. We don’t know how much it (transportation cost) is. How can we make an impact in the C-Suite or anyplace else where we’ve got to convince folks that this is a program that could be helpful if we don’t even know how to define it? Right now, we can’t define it, so we can’t measure it.”
“Our health system spans 20 states and 70+ acute care facilities. We have a real driving desire to figure out the area of transportation. Do we really know what we are doing? Do we really know what our true costs are?”
“It’s the cost to deliver that service to those points, and keeping that cost standard across the organization as we add more locations. I know we’re going to see larger spend as an aggregate, but cost to deliver that service individually is what we really need to measure.”
“There’s a very easy way to win over a lot of constituents, and that is to show in some level of specificity how bad things are, and how bad things are getting.”