5 healthcare supply chain challenges and how to avoid them

Snap & Go is an easy-to-use system that enables medical product identification and charge capture through image recognition technology.

Full UDI information is digitally populated in the hospital’s EMR/ERP/MMIS systems: manufacturer’s name, ref no., batch\lot no., expiration date, and serial number as required by FDA regulations.

Snap & Go helps reduce sentinel events by providing safety alerts of expired and recalled items at the point of care, including external inventory. 

Visual proof of use is documented automatically as part of the charge/data capture process. The platform, powered by AI and machine learning, maintains a daily-updated global manufacturer catalog list database including UDI and UPN raw data, which enables the automatic charting of items used during a procedure. 

When the system cannot identify an item a remote human back-office team updates the missing information and corrects “bad data” on the fly, to enhance the integrity of items registered in the hospital item master and to provide more than 99% reading accuracy. Relieving the clinical team of time-consuming data entry and obtaining more precise surgery costs means capturing lost revenue through accurate charge-capture, better forecast planning and timely reimbursement.

Kanban for Healthcare offers a reliable and efficient supply management method that helps hospital replenish their medical inventory while reducing waste and avoiding counting errors.

When the method is applied, RFID technology is incorporated to provide automatic re-order. There is a wide range of solutions that differ in the amount of involvement required by the medical staff. The most autonomous solution is the wireless and smart weighing bin by IDENTI Medical, which offers a portable scale with a digital display that automatically creates an inventory order according to the weight of the items inside the bin. 

The GS1 (Global Standards 1) recently adopted a new standard for item identification that permits for the use of one of two methods to obtain GS1 compliance: barcoding or UHF RFID.

Several multinational medical suppliers, including Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, have opted to use UHF RFID and are now in the process of tagging all their products accordingly.

IDENTI Medical provides a complete solution for the next generation of Smart Cabinets that includes advanced UHF RFID embedded in the cabinet and a seamless connection to cloud services and business intelligence-based management software, connecting all stakeholders in the medical supply chain.

RFID Smart Cabinet for hospitals is an automated inventory system developed to helps cath labs, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, EP labs, orthopedics, plastic surgery, gastro and many more operation rooms with their medical inventory management.

The technology tracks at individual item level tagged items stored inside the cabinet, including batch numbers and expiration dates.

The most advanced smart cabinets incorporate a new generation of ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID tags that are capable of transmitting longer and can be covered by multiple antennas. This enables every stocked item to be read, no matter the size or placement of the items within the cabinet.

Specialization in such technology requires in-depth knowledge of RFID technology, its capabilities, and applications. IDENTI Medical is one of a few companies that has managed to provide the high level of accuracy required in the medical sector.

The UDI system was intended to provide easier traceability of medical devices, reduce safety errors, to fight against falsified devices, and eventually significantly improve the effectiveness of operational inventory management and waste. There are many options to record UDI data in hospitals, but today, many medical centers chose to capture UDI information through image recognition technology. The technology, which is fully utilized in various industries, has proven to be efficient and accurate because it decodes a digital image of the product without the need to rely on external tagging or a limited barcode structure. Hence the technology can pull all the relevant information—manufacturer number, serial number, batch number, expiration date—directly from the product label without human involvement, and to populate all the hospital’s software systems.

Healthcare inventory management, or supply chain management is an inclusive term for the group of processes by which healthcare providers are able to perform perpetual inventory tracking, purchases, orders, payments, and more.  The main goal in implementing such systems in large and decentralized organizations is the ability to manage medical inventory in a single centralized management software that can synchronize all internal inventory management processes automatically, to save human resources and avoid revenue losses. One of the biggest problems in recent years is the amount of time and effort required from clinical teams. Today the goal is to develop semi-autonomous systems that do not burden the medical staff with these administrative tasks.

Smart cabinets are an automatic method for managing medical inventory in healthcare organizations, which enable digital tracking and full transparency of implants, tissue and medical devices. Smart cabinets, which are based on RFID technology, can manage inventory at the item level and therefore becomes the most appropriate method for transitioning into consignment stock management. UHF RFID is the most up-to-date and accurate technology for this task due to its ability to accurately read the tags on the product regardless of the angle, orientation, or type of product.

Expiration date management is a protocol which is used to ensure that surgical inventory is safe and proper before being used on a patient. Expired products have the potential to harm or cause detriment to a patient’s health. While the importance of removing expired products and supplies from hospital inventory may seem obvious, 7% to 10% of products expired sit on hospital shelves. Hospitals over the years have tried to address the problem by applying automated expiration date solutions, but the real problem begins when expiring products that were not in the original inventory planning and do not undergo validation reach the operating room theatre—emergencies that require immediate products, products that come directly from the supplier, products taken from other kits are most likely to use expired products. It is therefore important to implement an expiration validity solution that addresses these cases as well. Expiration date management is a problem for many hospitals because they continue to rely on manual processes that slow down their staff and leave too much room for error.