Healthcare – Data and Spend Management

• Posted Under Healthcare
• May 24th, 2010

What we generally see as laymen when we walk into a hospital is a reception, pharmacy, a few rooms with patients and some people walking around in white coats called doctors and nurses. Did we ever imagine what goes into maintaining this hospital and making sure the doctors are able to serve the patients coming in on a regular basis? I can say that the answer is no? with out any hesitation.

So what actually happens at the backend? How do hospitals manage all the data related to inflow & out flow of patients, surgical equipment, finances, drugs and so on? The answer to these questions is Information Technology.

In case of hospitals there is one thing that plays a major role in allowing them to concentrate on patient care rather than critical medical staff tracking supplies from thousands of vendors (manufacturers, distributors); an Efficient Supply Chain Management System?.

SCM represents as much as 15-30% of net patient revenues and changing prime vendors and major suppliers affects an entire healthcare system.

Supply Chain Management is absolutely critical for hospitals and here are a few statistics that prove this fact:

• Data cleansing accounts for up to 70% cost and effort in implementing data warehousing projects
• Dirty data costs U.S. businesses $600 billion per year (source: Data Warehousing Institute)
• Industry average to process PO manually is $75, automated PO is $10-$30
• 40% of buyer?s time, 68% of accounts payable time is spent on manual processing of PO
• 25% of hospital supply administration time is spent on cleaning and correcting data inaccuracies
• 54% of materials management purchases and 35% of surgical purchases are made using EDI/Internet
• 70% of errors in EDI transactions can be attributed to inconsistencies between product data held by buyers and seller Read more