Supply Chain

There's a tremendous amount of waste occurring in the healthcare industry. Organizations are moving to lean management because it exposes what and where these wastes are and rethinks the way work is done via value streams. Healthcare Finance News talked to a lean management expert to take a look at how waste impacts organizations.

Cost cutting is no longer a laudable aspiration in healthcare facilities - it is a way of life. At the center of this effort is the materials manager (MM) and it can be an unenviable position to occupy. One might even say MMs are between and a rock and hard place when it comes to their role in cost containment.

Although summer movies highlight the deeds of solo superheroes, attacking hospital supply costs is strictly a team effort. At the Premier Breakthroughs conference in Nashville on June 6, representatives from Methodist Health System in Dallas, Texas, chronicled their 18-month collaboration with Premier Consulting Solutions – a partnership that helped significantly reduce supply costs and keep them there.

Critics of a pilot program designed to lower the cost of medical equipment purchased by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently received support for their concerns in a new report released by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). But while the models used by researchers confirmed earlier outside assessments of the program, the director of the program says the researchers got it wrong.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will penalize hospitals for readmissions beginning this autumn. As a result, many healthcare providers are taking a cold hard look at their bottom line in an effort to meet or exceed projected targets for the year. The difficult part, of course, is that each healthcare provider has its own unique challenges. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

The use of generic prescription drugs has risen to a current rate of $1 billion every other day, saving the U.S. healthcare system more than $1 trillion over the last 10 years (2002-2011), according to a report released Thursday by the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA).

Studies have illustrated the potential benefits of EHR adoption, such as improvement in the clinical care process and the overall patient experience. EHR implementation, however, can also have a significant impact on operational efficiencies, creating opportunities for healthcare organizations to leverage the same workflow automation capabilities to improve a number of cumbersome administrative processes to drive bottom line improvement.

During a White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) conversation on July 24, leaders in healthcare and policy discussed the Healthier Hospitals Initiative (HHI) to reduce the environmental footprint of hospitals, lower costs and improve overall patient health by including sustainability efforts and initiatives into their business models.

Based on venture capital funding levels, deal totals and merger and acquisition activity, global consulting firm Mercom Capital Group reports that the healthcare IT sector is experiencing its highest levels of economic bustle since 2010.

With the financial pressures that healthcare organizations are facing, many hospitals are using traditional cost cutting methods to save money by looking at layoffs and staff reductions. Many more hospitals, however, are finding ways to reduce costs through lean management methods that don't require layoffs and can improve quality for patients.