Hospitals spend less time, save more when optimizing medical supplies with software platform
After analyzing years' worth of project and customer data, healthcare supply chain company Z5 Inventory has expanded the capabilities of its software in order to empower healthcare workers to make informed supply decisions.
Taking immediate and continuous steps toward right-sizing inventory will help hospitals address the fact that currently as much as 30% of all medical and surgical supplies are thrown away before they can be used, resulting in an annual $5 Billion waste across the industry, according Z5 Inventory press release.
The traditional method of perioperative inventory optimization is dependent on a large-scale project that requires a proportionally large commitment of resources. Waves of teams would travel between provider sites assessing inventory needs, at which point analytics external to the software would provide a roadmap for a secondary set of teams to revisit sites and perform the physical tasks of moving, selling and donating supplies.
To relieve hospitals of the burden of medical inventory optimization projects, the newly redesigned Z5 Inventory Platform gives users the ability to discover savings opportunities while conducting everyday supply chain management tasks.
The thought of right-sizing inventory became this giant, intimidating monster of a problem," explains Carl Natenstedt, a twenty-year veteran of the healthcare supply chain and CEO of Z5 Inventory.
Supply chain and finance professionals can now use the Z5 Inventory Platform to have full visibility into what is on their healthcare facilities' shelves, as well as real-time analytics to advise whether that product should be kept, moved, sold or donated.
As a speaker at the 2021 AHRMM conference,. Natenstedt explained: "One of our partners, Steward Health Care, worked with Z5 Inventory to prevent more than $29 million worth of inventory from expiration and achieve a savings of more than $16 million that was able to be reinvested in the care they provide their communities."
The newly redesigned Z5 Inventory Platform provides healthcare providers with:
- Real-time excess identification suggesting savings opportunities.
- Industrywide product database supplementing hospital inventory data.
- Simple barcode scanning (UPC, GTIN, NDC, and more) speeding data capture.
- Elastic search with NLP recognizing exactly what you're trying to look up.
- Expanded functionality enabling a wider variety of inventory tasks (cycle counts, perpetual inventory counts, pharmacy counts, expiration sweeps).
