Talha Shaikh, Co-founder, Biddano talks about the role of technology in Indian healthcare supply chain
Minimising healthcare costs has become the norm for majority of hospitals and physician practices these days, especially as payers start to tie claims, reimbursement amounts to quality and cost performance. Several organizations are eyeing on the billing and services portion of the revenue cycle for cutting budget, but others have started to examine their healthcare supply chain management.
The supply chain essentially comprises of the resources needed to deliver goods and services to the consumer. In healthcare, managing the supply chain can be a very complex and fragmented process.
Healthcare supply chain management is a process ranging across several verticals from obtaining resources and managing supplies to delivering goods and services to providers and patients. For the process to run effectively, physical goods and information about medical products and services have to go through a number of independent stakeholders, including manufacturers, insurance companies, hospitals, providers, group purchasing organizations, and several regulatory agencies.
However, by promoting efficiency in the healthcare supply chain, hospitals and physician practices can create substantial cost-reducing opportunities across their organization.
Here’s how digitisation can step in as a game changer:
Digitising the supply chain offers a cost-effective opportunity for health care providers to deliver the right product to the right patient at the right time. Building a digital supply chain will also position health care organizations to leverage technological advances designed to improve data flow and analytics, provider-patient connectedness, asset tracking, and regulatory compliance.
Pricing accuracy, greater levels of transparency and communication brought through the dissemination of actionable data by digitisation and more revenue cycle accountability will put some much needed discipline into what is now a relatively shaky supply chain picture.
Hospitals are managing a higher volume of cash cycle issues, write offs, write downs, and payment plans than ever before. They are also struggling to remain fiscally conservative within an evolving consumer-driven payment landscape. Adopting Digital Supply Networks (DSNs) can ease this task by several manifolds
In order to ensure that clinicians can access the supplies they need without resorting to hiding away hospital supplies, the people in revenue cycle management need to stay close to the computer screen and work the transactions, the numbers, and the issues, allowing nurses and physicians to reallocate their valuable time to taking care of their patients. Implementing data analytics and automation tools may make supply chain management much easier.
Automation allows clinicians to spend more time delivering high quality care and less time squirreling away their favourite products just to ensure they are available when required. It allows multiple different value propositions, but really allows the ability to capture data at every point in the supply chain and share that data all the way back to the key constituents.
Data and analytics can transform the healthcare supply chain into a strategic business asset, but solutions need to connect technology to everyday processes and make data visible.
The healthcare industry is still struggling to streamline its supply chain management strategies because so many different people, organizations, and touch points are involved in the process. Data-driven platforms allow information to be shared so that the industry can solve some of its greatest cost problems.
Tracking and monitoring products in a transitional reimbursement landscape means focusing on the greater importance of big data.
Take for instance, knowing the shelf life of a product:
A product approaching its expiration date with a week left of “useful life” becomes pretty much unsellable. Traditionally, pharmaceutical manufacturers trashed this type of product and took it as a write-off. Every company is looking at how to leverage big data to help in any one of these areas:
- Patient outcomes
- Improving and reducing the cycle time for manufacturing
- Ensuring they don’t have excess inventory that they have to write off
With the advent of digitisation they can use new tools and new technologies to really understand not only what inventory has, but what the demand is for the expiry date of all these products.
The industry needs to turn an overwhelmingly messy collection of big data into actionable insights, but poor data integrity and a lack of standardisation is preventing providers from leveraging many of the resources at their disposal. Providers have to work diligently to develop the core competencies required to make accurate estimations about inventory and prevent spending increases that occur with little to no justification. Without digitization , the volume of data to deal with is just massive and unmanageable, preventing stakeholders at different levels from making the most of the pre-existing information and resources.
A healthcare system that delivers the right product at the right place at the right time can become reality with more digitization being added to supply chain network.
Continued investment in automation, digitisation and data analytics, as well as a push towards greater data transparency and reliance on more streamlined standards, may help to mend broken supply chain links in the much fragmented and diversified ecosystem of supply chain network in India.
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