Top 3 Ways Healthcare Providers Can Improve Their Supply Chain

Working in healthcare is a challenging field that requires supply chain managers to have full visibility of their inventory at all times. This ensures healthcare supply chains run efficiently to move medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, tools utilized for surgery, and other medical devices from distribution centers to healthcare facilities. As a result, orders are turned quickly so doctors and nurses have what they need to get their jobs done. Keep your logistics operations streamlined with these three tips to improve supply chains, maximize productivity, and increase profits.

Identify and Address the Changing Medical Landscape

Changes in the economy have created fluctuations in the pricing of goods and services over the last few years. It started when The Affordable Care Act in 2010 changed the “fee for service” model of healthcare to one that revolved around cost and quality. However, this landscape change has been especially noticeable, and troublesome, when the world faced global shutdowns at the beginning of the 2020s and created a labor shortage.

Due to this, integrated delivery networks (IDNs) in healthcare saw a significant increase in the cost of labor and supplies, which has impacted hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, and other facilities. In fact, because they’re in-demand, essential workers, doctors and nurses have received larger compensation packages to retain them.

As a healthcare organization, you must look for opportunities to reduce product/supply costs where you can to accommodate these employee wages. This may be a difficult task because it can be hard to gauge the various levels of inventory. If you follow data you can predict ebbs and flows of demands of specific items. Then you can control on-had inventory to save money on your supply chain in the long-run.

Upgrade Healthcare Supply Chain Logistics

You know the saying – modern problems require modern solutions. If you’re a distributor of healthcare supplies and your supply chain is stalling on productivity, chances are you have waste in your operation. Moving products from point-to-point in a healthcare warehouse is a time-consuming process, but there are ways to consolidate or optimize functions to meet the fullest capacity of labor. For example, picking and fulfillment can be improved with assistance from advanced technology, such as autonomous robots or goods-to-person systems like AutoStore.

Outsource to 3PL E-Commerce Professionals

Healthcare supply chain management to serve numerous beds and facilities requires constant management, from real-time visibility of thousands of deliveries to creating flexible processes that can change as new challenges arise. It may benefit your business to reach out to a third-party logistics (3PL) provider like Ryder for assistance. Whether you need warehouse management or an end-to-end solution that includes a dedicated transportation solution that includes trucks and drivers to handle deliveries, a 3PL is designed to exceed the expectations of your supply chain and transportation logistics needs.