Elizabeth Meyers learned about healthcare logistics as a first year operating room nurse assisting with pediatric ear, nose and throat surgeries. Those procedures were never treated as routine, she remembers, because infant airway are very small and sensitive. One key supply to always have on hand was a pediatric suction — a tiny catheter that draws out fluids from the airway.
“During my operating room orientation, I learned that this particular suction wasn’t used anywhere else in the entire hospital — and it’s crucial, you have to have them if anything goes wrong,” says Meyers.
Surgery orientation is also where she also learned about “hidey holes” — the drawers and closets where health care workers stash medical supplies they can’t do without. As Meyer’s career progressed, she learned that hidey holes were everywhere.
“There were secret stashes of supplies all over the hospital,” she recalls. “But it seemed to me there had to be a better way. The surgeon, the anesthetist, everyone ought to know where these crucial supplies were located so anyone can find one in an emergency. And supplies like pediatric suctions have an expiration date — the seals can degrade making the packaging no longer sterile.”
“There were secret stashes of supplies all over the hospital. But it seemed to me there had to be a better way.”
Today, as nurse executive and healthcare analytics strategy director at business software maker Infor, Meyers is trying to meld the two worlds of healthcare and technology. The Minnesota native, former Army captain, and nurse has the perfect hybrid background to pull off such a complicated feat. In addition to her nursing degree, she’s earned a master’s in technology management, and she’s now working on a doctorate in health informatics.
Medical inventories present a unique challenge to hospitals — as Meyers learned as a nurse. The whole area is tightly regulated. Many supplies are perishable and running out of a key supply is not like running out of milk at the grocery store. Not when patient’s lives depend them. Because of these risks, hospitals tend to overstock. As a result, the tens of thousands of items stocked by a typical hospital represent 20 to 25 percent of total operating costs. Bottom line: a lot of money sitting on a shelf in an industry running on a 2–3% margin.
And now there is a better way. This summer, Infor introduced a new offering called Inventory Intelligence for Healthcare (IIH), developed by its Dynamic Science Labs (DSL) team, that is designed to help health care providers better manage supplies based on data from hospitals, care units, and patients. It reflects Infor’s focus on building software that is tailored for specific industries and aimed at eliminating a hospital’s hidey hole mentality.
To build the solution, Infor tapped Meyers’ clinical experience, as well as data analytics expertise from Dawn Rose, a scientist manager at DSL who has a doctorate in math from Clemson University. The lab, based in Cambridge, Mass., solves a range of business problems by applying data science in close collaboration with customers in healthcare, retail, financial services and other industries.
“The real difficulty is overcoming the fear factor,” Rose explains. Clinicians, doctors and administrators understandably think of patient safety first. That’s why they’re comfortable with manual systems they can see and touch. They need to be convinced that a data-driven inventory solution is foolproof. “You have to earn their trust,” says Rose.
To build a solution that could win over hospital staff, Rose and her team developed an analytics model based on a combination of historical supply chain data — three and a half years’ worth — and a year of current data from a sample hospital’s experience. That allowed her team to try out different approaches and test them against the real world. It also gave the sales team evidence to use with skeptical hospital administrators.
In some departments, where it saw unique, unanticipated risks, the model called for extra inventory. Elsewhere, in less risky more common general treatment areas, the model recommended stocking fewer items. Overall, the analytics forecasted a measurable drop in carrying costs.
Managing supplies more efficiently can lead to other downstream benefits. Caregivers can spend less time filling out forms and hunting for supplies and more time caring for their patients. It can also improve patient safety and reduce medical mistakes because vital supplies are always on hand when they’re needed and located where clinicians can find them, not in hidey-holes.
Looking ahead, IIH is expected to connect with two significant trends in health. One is standardizing procedures, so fewer supplies are needed and suppliers can package what’s required. And the second, related one is evidence-based medicine, where data, like that collected by IIH, is used to establish best practices.
“But it still comes down to the human side,” adds Meyers. “It takes culture change not just a technological solution. Healthcare always boils down to an individual provider caring for an individual patient, and everyone is a patient at some point in their lives.”
