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Erika Bajars demonstrates BD FluStock’s pandemic supply planning service to Advocate’s Darin Roark, R.N.

Officials from the Franklin Lakes, NJ-based medical device manufacturer met here at the west suburban Chicago corporate headquarters of multi-hospital system Advocate Health Care to demonstrate the company’s newly launched BD FluStock planning service. The proprietary software tool is designed to help hospitals choose critical BD medical devices and forecast appropriate inventory levels to better prepare itself for pandemic influenza.

"If a pandemic occurs there will be shortages of devices, no doubt about it," said Erika Bajars, director of marketing, hypodermic, BD Medical’s Medical Surgical Systems unit. "We need to figure out how to handle that and what to do if and when it occurs."

For Bajars, BD FluStock is a key intelligence weapon in a hospital’s clinical and operational arsenal, but she acknowledges that healthcare will battle seemingly insurmountable odds. "Experts agree that it’s not if but when a pandemic occurs," she noted. "The timing and severity is uncertain and the implications are impossible to predict." Implications include how healthcare facilities will react to their own patient load, how they’ll assist or cooperate with other facilities and how much product will be available.

"What’s troubling to us is that the government is funding development of vaccines but not processes to deliver [the vaccines] to the end users," she said. Federal planners should be working with companies like BD, for example, to supply enough syringes to compensate for unpredictable surges in demand. While it may take six to eight months to develop a vaccine, she noted, it takes 12 to 18 months on average to ramp up production of syringes – from raw materials to customer distribution. "If everyone waits until six months out, it will be too late," she added.

Moreover, BD works with customers around the world whose demand will strain product availability in the American supply chain. "When we look at this we don’t see any one group owning it," she said. "Every link in the chain is necessary. If
everybody does a little we’ll be able to manage this."

While some industry experts and observers advise against stockpiling product and instead rely on high-frequency distribution programs with contingency plans, Bajars doesn’t believe that’s realistic.

"We’re recommending stockpiling," she said, matter-of-factly. "We’ll be better able to accommodate demand if providers are stockpiling now. During a time of extreme crisis, [just-in-time] will fail in the healthcare system. In the face of crises, regular healthcare doesn’t stop. People still have babies and heart attacks. And the ‘worried well’ will show up at the door, too, taking up time and space. So any hiccup in the supply chain with JIT will create problems."

As a result, BD FluStock enables hospitals to forecast estimated demand for continuity planning and patient surge during a pandemic. Using the software, hospitals can create a variety of potential continuity and patient surge scenarios that rely on key assumptions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FluSurge Program and they can generate customized supply planning recommendations per scenario. BD FluStock incorporates manufacturer catalog numbers for electronic cross referencing and group purchasing organization con-
tract data to facilitate cost analyses, according to Bajars.

BD FluStock is one component of BD Medical’s preparedness kit it offers to customers at no cost. Company representatives use the risk management software tool to assist hospital officials with their inventory volume and product formularies based on user-selected criteria for pandemic influenza. Bajars noted that BD FluStock is not downloaded or uploaded to hospital computers, nor does it interface with automated supply chain management systems.

Darin Roark, R.N., director, clinical products review, in Advocates’ supply chain management department, said he found the tool easy to use, quick to learn and effective for their planning purposes because it allows them to focus more of their attention in other areas. Those areas include determining where to stockpile supplies, how to manage care for patients and support its workforce during a crisis.