Did you know that at most hospitals the cost of supplies represents one of the largest budget items after labor costs? This means that there is an immediate opportunity for hospitals to realize rapid, substantial, and lasting savings. What our experience has shown us is that most hospitals only track “perpetual” commodity supplies and document select implants. In fact, the share of products not tracked or accounted for by most hospitals is VAST. This is what we at VUEMED call “the blind spot” in healthcare.
Hospitals’ typical approaches to managing their clinical inventory are inadequate and inefficient, and the vast majority of hospitals have no reliable, real-time, and on-hand clinical inventory data. They don’t track expirations. They do poor recall tracking. They have unproductive par-levels management. And they don’t have accurate records.
These failings can lead to serious problems, such as costly waste, incomplete revenue generation, incorrect purchase orders, improper product mix, safety risk to patients, errors in patient charts, billing fraud, excess inventory, and much more. The blind spot is a debilitating, costly, systemic, under-the-radar problem due to the lack of an adequate inventory management system.