With reimbursements from all government, funding sources reduced the past few years, finding ways to improve processes and cost efficiencies, while providing continuing excellent care to patients in multiple counties, became a critical goal for Cape Fear Valley.

One target area for improvement was charge captures and inventory reconciliation/reduction – essentially a manual system that relies on yellow stickers to keep track of inventory used. Two full-time members of our staff piggybacked the stickers on thousands of supply items each day. When treating patients, medical staff pulled the stickers as supplies were used and placed them on patient cards.

The cards were sent to a central processing area where an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 charges were input daily by our employees (1.5 full-time equivalents)

The process was extremely time and personnel intensive.

It became obvious we needed to look to technology for some answers. After evaluating a number of systems, we selected Omnicell’s BCX ScanREQ technology. It appeared to be the most versatile and the technological support was highly rated.

Our automation project was no small task, with the need to install ScanREQ in 57 point-of-use locations in two hospitals, managing both the PAR and perpetual inventories.

The ScanREQ system is a perpetual real-time inventory system. As transactions are taking place on the floor, the inventory on-hand is being updated in the database.

The system incorporates minimum and maximum fields for streamlined picking and ordering. Once the materials management staff is ready to pick (or replenish) items for an area in the hospital, they just print the pick ticket and the system will calculate the needed amount from the min/max fields.

For items not stocked at the hospital, orders are sent via an interface to the hospital’s purchasing system. This saves a tremendous amount of time in picking products for replenishment.

Data for the system is collected two ways: nurses use BCX’s ScanREQ, point-of-use charge capture system, and materials managers use the BCX Pocket Pro hand-held to scan bulk items in supply rooms. ScanREQ sends the inventory data directly into the BCX database. The Pocket Pro is downloaded to the database through an InventorySys terminal. Pocket Pro is used in all areas where no ScanREQ station is installed. Charges are sent via an interface to the hospital’s patient accounting system.

Over the past five months, we have installed ScanREQ at 43 of the 57 point-of-use areas with the others expected to go online within a few months.

In addition to basic capture and management functions, BCX has created a messaging system enhancement. It gives the distribution manager in an off site warehouse, servicing two or more hospitals, the ability to communicate with the end-user nurses. This is critical in healthcare today because of multi-facility healthcare systems with centralized warehousing. Here is an example of how it works: today the warehouse is backordered on a specific fluid (also very helpful for recalls, product changes, etc). The materials manager or his staff can type a message into the Inventory Management system, and within 30 seconds every station in all of his hospitals, is scrolling this information out so the end user is immediately informed.

The results of our charge capture and inventory reconciliation system automation are dramatic. In just five months:

• On hand inventory has been and continues to be reduced.

• Charge capture has increased 28 percent, resulting in increased revenue for the Health System.

• Staff compliance for using the system is good enough that supply reconciliation at 43 locations has been reduced from daily to weekly.

• In fact, we just hit a new milestone. We as a health system just hit 90% utilization compliance. We are already several months ahead of our expected goals.

That means for four days in 43 locations at two hospitals, we no longer have to physically inventory supplies. We can simply hit a few buttons and punch up a replenishment report. I do not have to tell any of you the impact of this on labor savings.