Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1471341
41 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING 2 EXECUTIVE BRIEFING William M. Peacock, III, chief of operations at Cleveland Clinic agreed. "I want to be in communication with as many supply chain links as I can to understand the issues our suppliers are seeing," he said. "With that information, we can adjust with clinicians up front and continue to provide resilient care to patients." To improve supply chain productivity, Cardinal Health and healthcare organizations are turning to new technologies Cardinal Health leverages advanced technologies to improve demand sensing, data ingestion and inventory management. As Pete Bennett, senior vice president of global planning at Cardinal Health, said, "I think the healthcare industry needs to get away from historical consumption rates and look at multivariable demand planning. This means considering factors across the globe that are external to healthcare, like inflation, limitary actions and crisis management that could disrupt global supply chains." Supply chain leaders within health systems also recognize the importance of forecasting appropriately and aligning demand plans with distributors and manufacturers. "In the next two to three years, our data platform and new APIs will be huge," Dave Marcelletti, division chair of supply chain operations at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said. "We have hundreds of bots handling transactional work and fixing master data on our information platform. We are also developing APIs to engage other platforms and suppliers, so we can exchange information electronically in real time." While the supply chain team at UChicago Medicine has invested in several technology solutions to understand point-of-use inventory and to minimize product expirations, it is turning its attention to better forecasting and demand planning with suppliers like Cardinal Health. "Cardinal's demand planning and forecasting models are only as good as the data I provide to them," Eric Tritch, vice president of supply chain at UChicago Medicine, observed. "This is an area where we need to get better and it has to be at scale." Automation is another area of focus for Cardinal Health. The company recently launched 33 robotic process automation (RPA) bots to look at the estimated time of arrivals every day. This helps Cardinal Health provide more clarity and accurate information to customers about inbound products. "Our employees in supply planning could get through about 2,000 lines of purchase orders per day," Mr. Bennett said, " and we had to figure out how to process 8,000 lines of data a day. The automation has been incredibly successful. Bots collect 8,000 lines of data each day and we no longer have frustrated employees trying to keep up with PO management." On the warehouse side, Cardinal Health recently piloted autonomous mobile robots in some of its distribution centers. The employees loved the robots and the technology drove greater efficiencies, a stronger safety culture and improved quality. Technology alone, however, isn't enough — it must be integrated into a solid supply chain strategy Before deploying technology, healthcare organizations must first identify the supply chain problem they want to solve. "Too often, we see teams urgently trying to acquire and install a new piece of technology," Mr. Tritch noted. "Before adopting a new tool, we must evaluate whether it will solve the problem. What's the process, how will it change and is the process stable enough for the technology to work instead of causing more confusion? If we get more supply chain visibility upstream, what can we do with that information?" Mayo Clinic takes an approach of strategy first, process second and technology third. After those stages are complete, people are organized to support the new model. "You don't just implement technology for technology's sake," Mr. Marcelletti said. "Focusing on process has really helped us with the digital journey. We're lucky to have good processes in place to wrap technology around." Using this approach, about five years ago Mayo Clinic implemented Cardinal Health's WaveMark supply management system across all its procedural areas and in operating rooms across the nation. As part of this initiative, the team integrated WaveMark into the Epic EMR system. Cleveland Clinic has also adopted a methodical, incremental philosophy to develop a robust supply chain strategy that leverages technology. The initial emphasis was preventing expired products from reaching patients. "We had several events where we didn't discover expired products until after the case was closed," Mr. Peacock explained. "We began the process of reorganizing the entire workflow and asked Cardinal Health to help with that. As a result, we integrated about nine different IT systems and now we have total visibility into everything that enters our procedural or operating space. We have dropped expired products to zero." An additional benefit is that as products start to reach the end of their service life, Cleveland Clinic can identify where need exists elsewhere in the system and move those products laterally from the hospital or ambulatory surgery center. This ensures that the organization still derives value from the products they have purchased. Conclusion As healthcare leaders reimagine the supply chain, they are striving to optimize many competing priorities such as safety, quality, cost, speed of delivery and access to product. "From my perspective, it's all about using a technology-enabled system," Mr. Bennett said. "You need to build a synchronous method to monitor supply chains and networks. You must be able to plan at every echelon in the organization. If you don't do that, you're going to miss the ball." n For more supply chain insights, visit cardinalhealth.com/supplychain.