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SPECIAL FOCUS V is for visibility


Pandemic, epidemic response should drive supply data standards use by Rick Dana Barlow


or the better part of two decades this century, forward-thinking execu- tives from providers, suppliers and supply data standards service companies have preached the gospel of adopting and implementing supply data standards either incrementally for selected product lines or service lines or in full within healthcare organizations. hese spirited evangelists for such famil- iar (and they should be by now) acronyms as L, I, D, UDID and UDI have shared the good news on how adopt- ing and implementing supply data stan- dards can help with product tracking and traceability, increased accuracy, inventory visibility and waste reduction, among other benefits. Indeed, all of these ustifications have been shown in studies and in practice to generate decreased process and product costs and enable more time for clinicians to devote to patients. Even so, Healthcare Purchasing News has


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tracked provider and supplier adoption and implementation progress via reader surveys and reporting for at least the last decade with mixed results. ased on survey data from varying re- spondent pools, several trends consistently have emerged. Roughly a third of respon- dents either have implemented supply data standards in part or in full, another fifth are looking into it or planning to within 1 months,” another third haven’t or won’t and the remainder simply “don’t know.” Of those who havent or wont, the top two reasons continue to be that it takes too much effort or work or they don’t have enough budget or resources for it, particularly if the maority of providers and suppliers already aren’t doing it and the govern- ment isn’t requiring it with penalties for non-compliance.


Now with the world being whipsawed


by the COVID-19 pandemic, can or should providers and suppliers use that as yet another convenient excuse to claim some- thing else has higher priority than supply data standards?


Following a pregnant pause, the logical


answer by numerous sources to HPN is “nope.”


Imagine how the active use of supply data


standards could help locate the products necessary for protection from, identification of and treatment for COVID-19? Nearly a dozen supply chain leaders and professionals with whom HPN spoke see enough value in adopting and imple- menting supply data standards for all the right reasons … or at least make it a higher priority, even now in a pandemic-rattled and riddled world.


V-decrypt Amid the more obvious industry deficiency in terms of product shortages, the use of standards can spark visibility – as in what’s seen right away – followed by tracking and traceability, even though some might interchange the two. had ac rell, CEO, PAR Excellence, counts inventory visibility as probably the most important benefit of supply data standards “be- cause it relates directly to consumption and patient care  ustified against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Post COVID-19, this


Thad Mac Krell


obviously takes on new meaning and urgency,” Mac Krell told HPN. Our industry has dealt with recalls and coun- terfeit products in the past ([involving] product tracking, tracing and accuracy) and while messy, sometimes slow and often embarrassing, we can collectively get the ob done. he recent large-scale recall of packs is a reasonable example. ut this pandemic has created a new long pole in the tent – availability. he goal of these standards should be end to end inventory management to ensure availability,” Mac Krell continued. If we can create a framework that ensures end-to-end visibility, from the nurse’s out- stretched arm back to the manufacturing plant, we can simultaneously address ac- curacy, traceability, authenticity, etc., using enabling technology like lockchain, etc. Mac Krell likens the concept to the framework of “a staircase wherein any participant can see at least one-to-two steps


10 June 2020 • HEALTHCARE PURCHASING NEWS • hpnonline.com


up and down from their position with nearly real-time updates.” PAR Excellence historically has focused almost exclusively on the last two steps before patient care is delivered, he noted, which tends to be the storeroom and bin/shelf at the point of use. “We can access, in real time from our offices in Cincinnati, the status of more than one million PAR scales in hundreds of hospitals,” he said. “We can see what item is on the scale, how many there are and even predict when replenishment will be needed.” He further added that they’ve even integrated Amazon’s Alexa into the weight-based technology so that the care- giver can ask questions of the PAR system, such as “Where is the nearest location with more of product XYZ?”


Mac Krell laments that without data standards, “we are left to map products across customers to enable our inter-client analytics platform. COVID-19 has taught us that such details are needed in and between hospitals, distributors and manufacturers, especially for some critical but relatively inexpensive items like PPE.” As concerns about the COVID-19 pan- demic heightened, inventory visibility – or the lack thereof – has been at the root of supply confusion, product shortages and allocation issues that we have seen in healthcare, according to iobhan Oara, enior Vice President, Community Engage- ment, 1 U. In some cases, the products existed,


but their whereabouts were uncertain, Oara observed. “Not knowing how many 9 masks, PPE gowns, or ventila- tors are in inventory – or where they are – quickly became a crisis affecting the entire country. Provid- ers scrambled to locate the supplies they needed. Discrepancies came to light. he release of government stockpile and ware- housed equipment was backlogged by a dearth of information about where they were needed most. In many cases, the lack of shareable information about products in the inventories of suppliers, distributors


Siobhan O’Bara


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