October 4, 2023
Considering all the effort you put into the major, headache-inducing aspects of an ASC design and build — the endless delays, the never-ending regulatory hurdles...
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By: Johannon Olson
Published: 3/9/2021
A cardiac procedure is on the schedule and there are eight different-sized stents — at $80 a pop — that could be used. Your surgical team opens all eight, even though seven will likely be thrown away. That's $560 worth of supplies they're about to trash. All too often this sort of waste is baked into supply management practices.
What if there was a better way? Assigning staff members to review surgeons' preference cards, track use of supplies and change the cards to reflect actual supply usage can help you shave six — or even seven — figures off of case costs. At Stanford Health Care, where I used to work, updating the preference cards used in pediatric ORs reduced supply costs by more than $1 million, an 8% decrease. Achieving and sustaining this level of savings is relatively straightforward and very doable if you follow these basic steps.
As these team members work the high-volume procedures, they should make note of how many of the costly supply items were opened and how many were actually used. Over a period of several months, they'll have collected enough information for you to make data-driven decisions about trimming your supply budget.
When surgical techs (or whoever handles the data collection at your facility) start showing others their spreadsheet of supply items that can be removed from regular rotation, it often sparks a culture shift. Conversations begin among staff members and even surgeons about which items they can do without, and whether items actually need to be opened. At Stanford Health Care, this constant chatter led to real staff education about the actual costs of supplies, which we formalized in a fun way by running a Jeopardy-like game about product prices during daily huddles.
All you have to do for your efforts to make a real impact is get started.
Once your supply-tracking process gets started, staff members will see that it's working and making their lives easier — and saving your facility significant amounts of money. That's when it's time to consider putting more resources into the program to realize even more savings.
At Stanford Health Care, for example, the techs' spreadsheets served as a starting point for the creation of an automated algorithm that scoured electronic health records to determine which supplies were crucial and which weren't needed. The algorithm made corresponding updates to preference cards within the system. These changes created sustained cost savings over time without staff members having to manually update the cards.
You can implement a program for updating preference cards with your current resources at little to no cost. It could prove to be more effective at saving money than traditional efforts such as creating supply purchasing committees or implementing surgeon incentive programs. All you have to do for your efforts to make a real impact is get started. OSM
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