SARASOTA, FL, July 23, 2019 -- Healthcare Purchasing News named West Reading, PA-based Tower Health as the recipient of its 15th Annual Supply Chain Department of the Year Award. HPN, which provides clinical intelligence for supply chain leadership in print and online, selected this multi-hospital system’s Supply Chain team for its “home-grown problem solving and tool creation and development” capabilities that were achieved and linked directly to corporate strategic direction, as well as its dedication to professional development and integration with information technology.
Rather than outsourcing trouble spots to third-party organizations to solve as a purchased service, Tower Health’s Supply Chain team instead opted to fortify its internal entrepreneurial spirit that remains deeply rooted in management engineering ingenuity. The team works IT know-how and training into its hiring and staff development processes, it creates and develops software products to amplify operational procedures, and it augments existing software products with its own internally devised and driven enhancements.
Rita White, Tower Health’s Vice President of Supply Chain, acknowledged that Tower Health’s team transformation did not happen overnight.
“It required intense strategic planning, a thorough understanding of organizational goals, and an innovative vision for how Supply Chain can support high-quality patient care,” White said. “We attribute our accomplishments to the skill sets of our team, the vision of our leadership, and the support of Tower Health.”
Tower Health’s innovative Supply Chain team thrives on people-driven automation and technology and a standardized workflow that routinely includes clinical participation as the conduit to patient care and community service. Consequently, joining this team requires more than the traditional supply chain experience.
“We deliberately recruited talent with analytical skills, leading to a combination of logical thinking, technical know-how and professional work ethics,” White said. “Supply Chain leadership taught the team pertinent Supply Chain operations, communicated and clarified the ‘ask’ and vision of the initiative, and routinely monitored progress to ensure the solution was ‘staying on course.’ This empowered our team to develop ‘home-grown’ solutions specific to the needs of Tower Health and mine the data to obtain meaningful, informative insights.”
As part of its Supply Chain Department of the Year judging panel HPN historically includes supply chain executives from past title-holding organizations that have earned HPN’s top designation. Those supply chain executives hailed Tower Health for its innovative approaches to supply chain. In fact, one of the judges encapsulated HPN’s evaluation by saying that he usually judges nominated organizations by how much an organization teaches him and “challenges me the most to be better. Tower is doing that.”
The Tower Health Supply Chain team will be featured in HPN's August edition and distributed at the 2019 Annual Conference of the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM) in San Diego, July 28-31.
“Tower Health’s Supply Chain team transcends the definition of multi-disciplinary functionality and more accurately represents a multi-faceted mindset indicative of next-generation progress,” said HPN Senior Editor Rick Dana Barlow. “And if this team signifies supply chain performance development and improvement then this profession can anticipate a bright and promising future.”
Visit HPN Online for the article at https://www.hpnonline.com/hall-of-fame/article/21087717/a-tower-of-able.
