By Steve Heintze, vice president of sales

When a patient comes into the emergency room with a significant injury, doctors do everything they can to offer appropriate, effective treatment. They set broken bones and apply stitches. They may need to call in a specialist for certain cases, but they do not simply ignore a patient in hopes the problem goes away. Yet that seems to be the approach when it comes to addressing waste in health care spending. The results can be staggering. In supply chain alone, waste adds up to an estimated $25.7 billion each year, or about $12.1 million for individual hospitals. 

To put that number in perspective, $12.1 million would pay a full-time salary for approximately 168 registered nurses or 51 primary care physicians. With total knee and hip replacements expected to increase by 189% and 171%, respectively, by 2030, those will be valuable resources. Imagine how that could impact patient outcomes, satisfaction, and staff turnover. 

Health care spending waste isn’t solely a supply chain issue, of course. According to one recent estimate, waste accounts for a quarter of all health care spending. But supply chain offers a clear opportunity to make a significant difference. 

An effective hospital supply chain solution integrates with existing ERPs and EMRs to fill gaps and provide tools to enhance systems that lack well-thought-out resources for ongoing supply chain management. By providing accurate, real-time data on supply use, it streamlines the process of maintaining physician preference cards, reduces the amount of time nurses spend on non-patient activities, and increases revenue through charge capture. It also reduces nurse admin time and expense by as much as 50% by optimizing hospital supply chain with real-time data and analytics.
  

Hospital spending waste is a problem, but it’s a problem with a solution. By automating much of the work that currently falls to nurses or other employees, hospitals can improve efficiency, enhance care, eliminate stock outs and, key to it all, dramatically reduce waste. The key now is getting hospitals to take the problem as seriously as ER doctors take the injuries that come through the door every day.