Armed with real-time data, today's supply chain professionals are increasingly called upon for strategic decision support across departments.
Here are five statistics documenting providers' growing interest in supply chain data and analytics in the past three years.
1. Provider organizations ranked predictive analytics as the biggest supply chain opportunity in the next year, according to a 2017 Global Healthcare Exchange survey.
2. A Black Book survey from December 2016 showed 69 percent of healthcare IT leaders planned to prioritize the healthcare supply chain in coming years as "the most valuable asset for actionable data mining."
3. Many hospital systems see the opportunity to update outdated and manual supply chain processes. A 2016 survey of hospital executives by a major healthcare supplier revealed nearly one-third of providers haven't implemented a new inventory management system in at least six years. Another 25 percent of respondents said they didn't know when their organization last updated its inventory system. In fact, 78 percent are manually counting inventory in some parts of their supply chain and only 17 percent have implemented an automated technology system to track products and inventory in real time.
4. The need to reliably forecast supply chain outcomes will drive increased use of advanced analytics to improve supply chain management. Ninety-four percent of healthcare providers cited the use of analytics as an area of focus in supply chain, according to a 2017 Health Sector Supply Chain Research Consortium report. Other data-related focus areas were: use of supply chain performance benchmarks (93 percent of providers); integrating supply chain data with clinical data (87 percent); and improving data transparency across the supply chain (83 percent).
5. As the strategic importance of supply chain grows, so does the role of the supply chain executive. According to GHX's survey cited above, supply chain leaders expect to increasingly work hand in hand with clinical peers to lower costs and improve patient care.