Item Master Management in Healthcare
Maintain Your Hospital Item Master On-the-fly with AI Vision - From Clean Data to Continuous Accuracy
In healthcare, the item master is far more than a supply chain file. It is the foundation that operational, clinical, and financial workflows depend on. When item master data is inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated, the impact is felt across procurement, inventory management, billing, reporting, and reimbursement.
IDENTI’s Item Master Management in healthcare solution was designed to help hospitals move beyond periodic data cleanups and establish long-term data stability — ensuring a single, accurate source of truth that stays reliable over time.
The Hidden Cost of Poor Item Master Data
The Hidden Cost of Poor Item Master Data
Most hospitals operate with item masters that contain duplicate records, outdated products, inconsistent descriptions, and missing critical attributes such as units of measure, manufacturer identifiers, and consignment status. Over time, even systems that were once “clean” naturally degrade as suppliers change, products evolve, and new items are introduced.
Harness the power of AI vision for real-time Item Master updates
When you think about it, the status of the hospital Item Master is always pre or post cleanup, so the timespan of a clean catalog that’s free from “bad data” is exceptionally brief.
Item Master lists typically include between 10,000 to 100,00 lines, with an average healthcare provider holding data on around 50-60,000 SKUs. Much of this data is dynamic, with vendors making up to 10 million changes to item data each year. This makes managing SKU-level data a time-consuming task that requires substantial organizational time and resources.
Common Item Master Management in healthcare Challenges:
These data gaps create cascading problems:
- Incorrect or delayed purchasing decisions
- Inventory mismatches and manual investigations
- Billing discrepancies and missed charges
- Limited visibility for cost analysis and value initiatives
- Incomplete/inaccurate data in the item master causes barcode readability issues (if the GTIN encoded in a barcode is not in the system, the scan will fail.)
- OR systems often do not have a data governance process in place to help them resolve data quality issues once they are discovered.
Without a structured and sustainable approach to item master management, hospitals are forced into a cycle of recurring cleanup projects — each one costly, time-consuming, and short-lived.
It’s time to break free from the cycle of fixing “dirty data” or completing partial information. Embrace the Snap&Go AI documentation revolution and benefit from on-the-go item master maintenance.
Once the item master reaches a high level of accuracy, the benefits extend across the organization:
Item Master Management in Healthcare: From Clean Data to Operational and Financial Impact:
Value Analysis and Cost Control
A trusted data foundation enables meaningful cost analysis, contract compliance monitoring, and informed value analysis initiatives across departments. Item Master management in healthcare liberate your clinical team from manual workarounds when the system fails, and from the frustration of fixing data errors.
Supply Chain and Procurement
Standardized data reduces duplicate items, shortens resolution time for discrepancies, and improves visibility into usage, substitutions, and alternatives. Item Master management in healthcare: From Clean Data to Operational and Financial Impact ensure data gaps and typing errors don’t disrupt perioperative documentation and compromise your patient records.
Revenue Cycle and Billing Accuracy
Accurate item identification and classification support reliable charge capture, reduce billing discrepancies, and improve reimbursement integrity. Item Master management in healthcare: make sure ‘bill-only’, ‘off contract’ and substitute items are fully charged and recorded in the EHR, without being preloaded into the system.
What Is Item Master Management in Healthcare?
Item Master Management in healthcare is the practice of maintaining a complete, accurate, and standardized database of all products used across a healthcare organization. In modern healthcare environments, this goes far beyond basic item descriptions.
Effective item master management ensures that every product is:
- Correctly identified and classified
- Enriched with standardized clinical and logistical attributes
- Aligned across ERP, MMIS, inventory, and financial systems
- Continuously maintained as products and usage change.
When managed correctly, the item master becomes a trusted knowledge foundation that supports both day-to-day operations and strategic decision-making.
Prevent delays:
ensure the smooth flow of data into the EHR without bottlenecks
Prevent errors:
Put an end to risky, keyed-in data, following failed item master validation.
Go proactive:
Stop chasing your tail and ensure the perpetual maintenance of your item catalog
IDENTI delivers item master management as a continuous, technology-driven process rather than a one-time project. The goal is long-term data stability — where accuracy is maintained automatically, and exceptions are handled efficiently.
By combining advanced AI infrastructure with real-world usage data, IDENTI ensures that item master information remains synchronized, validated, and up to date across the organization.
IDENTI’s Approach to Item Master Management in healthcare
Why One-Time Item Master Cleansing Is Not Enough
Traditional approaches often focus on annual or one-time item master cleanup projects. While these efforts may temporarily improve data quality, they do not address the root problem: healthcare data is constantly changing.
New products are introduced, suppliers update catalogs, contracts shift, and clinical practices evolve. Without ongoing maintenance, even the cleanest item master will begin to degrade within weeks or months.
IDENTI was built around a different mindset — not just to clean the item master, but to eliminate the need to restart the process every year.
AI, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision as the Data Engine
AI-Led Item Master Maintenance: The Future of Healthcare Standardization
At the core of IDENTI’s solution is a powerful data management and Item Master management in healthcare framework built on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision.
- Machine learning models analyze patterns across complex catalogs to identify duplicates, inconsistencies, and missing data.
- A continuously updated cloud data lake aggregates product information from manufacturers, industry databases, and real-world usage insights gathered from IDENTI’s global customer base.
- Computer vision technology bridges the gap between physical products and digital records, enabling accurate identification and classification directly from images — not just ERP text fields.
This multi-layered approach transforms fragmented data into coherent, actionable intelligence that hospitals can rely on
Discover our Implant Management Bundle
Snap&Go employs image recognition technology to capture product information. This includes full UDI data such as batch numbers, serial numbers, manufacturer SKUs, and more, which are then directed to your local item catalog for identification. If there’s no match or missing information, the system cross-references our continuously updated virtual database, maintained by the daily activity of our global community.
Utilizing Snap&Go’s machine learning algorithm, we rectify data gaps to ensure complete item details are documented in the EHR and master lists. If the item remains unrecognized, our human back-office team reviews the proof-of-use image and fills in the missing data. This proven combination ensures 100% accuracy in your charting process and item master management workflow.
TOTALSENSE
RFID for hospitals = full inventory transparency
UHF RFID Cabinet and Mobile Hand Scanner – for the management of tagged medical devices, tissue and implant.
- Real-time, item-level visibility and control.
- Digital, UDI-compliant stock records.
- Effective expiry management.
- Automated, data-driven restocks.
- Inventory metrics, reports and insights
Perpetual stock monitoring and dynamic data keeps you up to date with inventory levels and steers management decisions.
The image-to-data revolution
SNAP&GO gives perioperative teams superpowers! The innovative image-capture technology delivers full digital charting in OR and Procedure Rooms – using patent-protected image-capture technology.
Currently, all existing solutions on the market depend on scanning technology—barcode/RFID/QRCODE—or necessitate manual data entry within EHR software. If an item is absent from the item master, nurses encounter difficulty completing reports as they receive error messages at the point of use.
Through a blend of image processing technology, which decodes images of items, it’s now possible to record items not present in the item master.
Watch the video below to see the power of three-second item capture:
Ongoing Item Master Maintenance Models
Elevate your Item Master Management in Healthcare : Maintain a consolidated hospital item taster without the involvement of the medical team
To prevent data degradation, IDENTI offers two proven maintenance pathways:
- Continuous Maintenance via AI and Computer Vision
As items are consumed, introduced, or updated, IDENTI detects changes in real time — keeping the item master synchronized with minimal manual effort. - Semiannual Structured Maintenance
For organizations that prefer scheduled refresh cycles, IDENTI provides structured biannual maintenance that revisits sorting, matching, visual identification, and validation stages to preserve accuracy.
With IDENTI, item master management in healthcare becomes a sustainable capability rather than a recurring problem. Hospitals gain confidence that their operational and financial decisions are built on accurate, complete, and continuously maintained data — today and in the future.
Data Is transferred into the Hospital Item-Master and EMR/ERP systems in 3 seconds!
Unrecognized items are identified by IDENTI’s Back-Office Team, who complete missing information
Image is identified and routed through a global database and an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm
Full product information Is captured via Image Recognition Technology
