Friday, March 29, 2024

Why Having An All-In-One Healthcare Inventory Management System Is Great For Your Business

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Inventory management has always played a significant role in the effective running of the healthcare industry. The importance of tracking all the moving parts in urgent care near me centers through meticulous record-keeping in the organization cannot be overstated, particularly with people’s lives at stake.

However, despite being a classic, the traditional systems have quite too often, been found to be unorganized, inaccurate, and the cause of constant but needless hassling.

Here are the reasons why your business needs an all-in-one healthcare inventory management system.

 

Patient Care

The priority of any healthcare business is patient care. It is the core responsibility of any medical institution. Now, in delivering the best patient care and fulfilling core responsibilities, a lot of tracking is to be done. The staff has to keep track of everything from medical supplies to patient files.

Medical providers use a plethora of items each day in their treatment of patients, and they use several of each of these items throughout the day spread over numerous shifts. As the tracking gurus at Grey Trunk further explain, the rapid turnover of all these essential items means every single one of these has to be precisely tracked so they can be replaced. The importance of always having medical supplies cannot be overstated. A shortage of any one of these items poses a serious threat to patient health. For a fair idea, examples of items that have a huge turnover besides the all-important drugs include:

  • Needles/Syringes — all types and varieties, and sharp disposal containers.
  • Nursing Aids — dressing aids, restraints, diapers, underpads, anti-embolism stockings.
  • OB/GYN — umbilical catheters, speculums, umbilical clamps, maternity briefs/pads.
  • Operating Room — table covers, towels, surgical packs, surgical instruments.

That’s not all that needs to be tracked. Meticulous patient files need to be kept, and of course, tracked.

The advent of an all-in-one inventory tracking system is one major innovation that makes the primary service of the healthcare industry and medical professionals easier. For one thing, your business will no longer run out of essential patient care items because staff entered the wrong numbers in the inventory books as a result of human error.

Plus, with the inclusion of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking patient files has never been easier. RFID is a fast-developing technology that utilizes radio waves for data collection and transfer, having the ability to capture data automatically without human intervention. It does not even require line-of-sight for readers to capture information from tags like barcodes.

Research shows that RFID not only solves the dangerous problem of misidentification issues in healthcare but that the technology has the ability to improve hand hygiene tracking practices and compliance, thus preventing hospital-acquired infections.

Investment Protection

In an ideal world, healthcare would be a calling focused on only healing the sick, but the truth is that for the efficient running of any healthcare system, things have to be run in the manner in which a business is run. This means investments.

For example, surgical instruments represent a large chunk of investment for most healthcare organizations. This does not only include the familiar small, stainless steel surgical instruments found in such places as dentists’ offices, but rather massive surgical instruments, especially those used in hospitals. The price of these instruments can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 or much more.

These assets cannot easily get replaced due to prohibitive costs or availability, so it makes sense to utilize an inventory management system for the purposes of asset tracking. An effective inventory management system allows for the tracking of the use of medical assets, the availability of these instruments, and the people that can be held accountable for the equipment.

An all-in-one inventory tracking system reduces the opportunity for loss and theft and allows your business to better manage the rotation of the instruments between surgery, sterilization, and storage.

Contract Compliance

To reduce the cost of purchasing goods and for staying within budgetary constraints many healthcare organizations such as pharmacies and hospitals have group-buying contracts with distributors and manufacturers of healthcare-related products. The costs involved in running any healthcare business are immense and it makes sense for your business to take measures -such as entering into these group contracts- to keep this under control, in light of limited funding opportunities.

A great way to make sure your business takes advantage of these contracts in the most profit-yielding way is to rely on an effective inventory control system. This is because an ineffective inventory control system leads to two unfortunate possibilities; either purchasing too many or too few of an item.

Neither of these scenarios is good for business. When a healthcare organization experiences a stock-out due to ineffective inventory management, it will force a purchase outside of the contractual terms thus forcing the organization to buy at increased prices instead of at the lower contracted prices. Also, it creates a purchase price variance and makes the organization non-compliant with the terms of the contract.

With an inventory management control system, there’s a reduced risk of stock-outs and forced overspending. Plus it keeps the business from breaching the group-buying contract; there are no occurrences of breach of contract suits that necessitate the payment of legal fees.

Staff Collaboration

Any company in the healthcare industry can guarantee that working as a team is a vital part of fulfilling all kinds of duties related to patient care. Traditional inventory tracking systems are typically only visible to one person, don’t work on any mobile devices, and certainly cannot connect to the cloud. All these shortcomings make it extremely challenging for staff and care providers to keep information in sync.

This is where an all-in-one inventory management system comes in handy. For one thing, all data can be uploaded onto a cloud. This means it can be synced. Multiple staff members can then have access to the system across multiple devices. As schools with online learning systems will tell you, the benefits of having everything conveniently online are numerous when you factor in things like teamwork. For example:

  • This allows the team to oversee information on the go
  • This allows the team to always know where they can find equipment or supplies
  • This allows the team to easily make changes when necessary

Whether you’re a solo practitioner, a medical device and equipment supplier or part of a larger medical facility such as a hospital or urgent care center, an all-in-one inventory management system allows you to take the guesswork out of inventory management. Things like patient care, teamwork, contract compliance, and asset protection become ten times more effective.

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