When Hershey Medical Center clinicians go to supply rooms, they expect to find masks and gauze pads on the shelves. However, earlier this year there was a 15% chance what they were looking for wouldn’t be there.
A shift in Supply Chain that involved a seamless transition to a new medical supply provider drastically cut those odds. When the change was made, everything went as quietly as planned – few doctors and nurses even noticed.
“It is a unique project,” said Justin Kemp, the hospital’s supply logistics manager. “We were actually celebrating that nobody knew it transpired.”
More than a year earlier, Hershey Medical Center had identified the need to replace its longstanding supplier when poor service levels negatively affected its materials and equipment supply.
“Our service levels were in the low to mid 80s. That meant that for every 100 items we ordered, only 80 to 85 were showing up,” explained Brian Schneider, Penn State Health’s director of supply operations. “That would cause the local supply chain team to scramble to react and find another source.”
In response, the team completed a comparative analysis of three distinct organizations. Owens & Minor, a global health care solutions company used by Penn State Health St. Joseph, came out on top.
However, before the switch could be made, they sought buy-in from a cross-functional team of stakeholders.
“Key members of nursing, medical and academic sites had to provide feedback before we made the transition,” Schneider said. “We had launched the project, identified a new supplier and detailed out a fine-tuned project plan.”
The goal, said Melanie Stutzman-Ricci, director of procurement for Penn State Health, was to avoid disrupting clinical end users.
“Never once was critical care put in jeopardy,” she said. “From the beginning, the only difference we wanted the clinical folks to notice was the improvement in delivery of product. We didn’t want to negatively impact what was on their shelf, but it ended up being an immediate improvement of what the previous distributor was providing.”
Following the official go-live with Owens & Minor, fill rates jumped from the low 80s to the mid 90s, a figure that is best-in-class, Schneider said. “Now when end users go to their supply rooms, instead of a 15% chance product won’t be there, it is 5%.”
More impressive, said Stutzman-Ricci, was that the team executed the project superbly in conjunction with Owens & Minor, ensuring “it wasn’t a blip on the radar for clinicians. It was a silent win.”
A silent win that put them one step closer to building a Penn State Health supply team.
“By moving toward one supply system, one supply team, we can achieve a streamlined supply chain and product portfolio,” Schneider said. “It also enables us as a team to work toward a universal inventory where, if one hospital runs out of product, we have levers and teams that can work collectively together to make sure we have the right product, at the right time and at the right place.”