Is 2022 going to look more like 2019 or 2020? As usual, we're here to ask a silly question and provide some serious answers.
Crossing that October-November boundary always gets people talking. About getting everything done before the end of the year (as if there's some magic reset point at midnight on January 1) and about preparing for next year (as if it will invent new challenges or new opportunities on its own).
The problem with both is that they pretend that we have an opportunity to bid farewell to the bad stuff and usher in the good stuff without doing anything ourselves.
But, as the five news articles we pulled together this week make abundantly clear, that doesn't exactly work.
- There's a great insight hiding in this basic primer on the uniqueness of healthcare providers' materials management: providers need to do review and manage their supplies line-by-line. But it's also functionally impossible for them to do that with the way the system is currently set up.
(If you need help identifying all your supplies headed for expiration - and you do - let Z5 provide you a fully customized risk assessment for free.)
- The majority of healthcare's leadership agrees: the medical supply chain is busted, and they haven't done everything necessary to get it fixed.
- Whether this is a symptom of the problem or the problem itself, expert analysis points to the idea that prices aren't fluctuating; they're rising. As in: your supply chain spend might not go back to what it used to be. Hopefully some of the burden on U.S. healthcare providers is lessened by the renewal of tariff exemptions for medical supplies.
- Using all that information, can we make predictions about healthcare delivery for 2022? One consultancy predicts that medical errors caused by overworked clinicians and security breaches caused by overworked supply chain and IT pros will erode public confidence in healthcare providers. (And nearly half of patients agree that they'd leave a provider affected by a security breach.)
- Okay, so let's look at what we can do. Let's plan for improvement. The best way to do that is often to look at who's doing well and copy them. Take a look at this year's list of the top hospital supply chains, and you might see that some of the Top 5 are Z5 Inventory partners.
COINCIDENCE???
One good thing that comes with this period of reflection and anticipation is the spirit of giving. Z5 Inventory is getting in the spirit by giving away customized analyses to every hospital in the country. Get started by estimating how much you might be about to throw away today: