Congratulations to MedBridge for winning the IOS 1st quarter 2017 contest with their article on automating and streamlining the procurement process. Every quarter IOS shares best practice submissions to help educate the community on supply chain automation in the non-acute healthcare market.The MedBridge Story
Sean Noel
Enterprise Materials Manager
We decided to go with IOS Envi because they were by far the most user friendly and most advanced solution available. The interfaces and the robust functionality were very important to us. We have a mix of solutions within our facilities so having the flexibility to integrate with multiple systems is really important.
My favorite part of the IOS system is the reporting. For my role, the ability to report at a corporate/enterprise level has been really great. If I am working with a vendor or a manufacturer to secure pricing I can pull our purchase order history out of Envi. Historically I would have had to login to each ASC’s system and compile this information one at a time. Now I can log in to Envi and see everyone’s spend. The barcode scanning is a life saver for the end users and the vendor punch-out and the EDI interface are also great.
Another big push for us to drive down costs has been interfacing with our clinical system (HST) to achieve case costing; being able to proactively do case costing before the case takes place helps assure our cases are profitable. We can begin to look at profitability pre-operatively since we have the preference cards built out by physician. Having the products updated cost from Envi allows us to review products, by case, pre-operatively and allows us to recommend possible substitutions. Having access to this information allows us towork with our physicians much closer regarding the supplies they use and in the end helps make us all more profitable and efficient in the future, thus allowing us to serve our patients better.
I think IOS is a great company witha great platform that has been easy to work with. I wish there were more of me so I could help all of our facilities utilize the system better. Implementation was great and it was relatively easy.
Summary of Best Practices
Scanners:
The scanners make ordering much easier for our staff. Utilizing the scanners and having materials management place orders for multiple vendors takes us about 15 minutes now. Old school process would have been one vendor at a time and wouldtake us about 2 hours.
EDI:
The EDI platform has been very helpful. In the past we had to manually compare, line by line, to make sure everything was accurate between us and the vendor. The EDI confirmation eliminates many steps.
The biggest efficiency gained has been time management. Effective use of the system yields hours of saved time both on an admin and end user level. Having access to our enterprise data has given us the ability to leverage and aggregate our contracts. We also are able to utilize the reporting system to be able to standardize our price and products on an enterprise level.
