Healthy relationships are crucial among supply chain leaders, physicians and hospital executives. Persistent tensions can hinder this collaboration, though.
At a HealthTrust Performance Group conference, physician advisors for the group purchasing organization recommended tactics for bridging this divide. During a panel discussion, the experts said level-setting and articulating common goals can help quell grievances.
"When you put a group of physicians and administration in one room, it is surprising to me how many times there's a bit of an adversarial atmosphere," Vijay Chilikamarri, MD, chief of cardiology at Lutheran Health Physicians in Fort Wayne, Ind., said in the panel.
"The recognition that we are all on the same side was very important for our team," he said. "Building relationships took a while, but trust was fundamental, and the fact that we are here to create a win-win situation for everybody — for the physicians, the patients and the hospital network — had to be verbalized."
Jason Mouzakes, MD, the interim general director at the Albany (N.Y.) Medical Center Hospital, agreed, adding that unclear communication can foster distrust between supply chain leaders and physicians.
Every day, Albany Medical Center issues a 10-minute briefing call to educate its employees on patient safety issues, including supply chain disruptions, according to a HealthTrust news release.
Shared decision-making and open dialogue can also help. For example, at San Diego-based Scripps Health, clinicians trial equipment before undergoing financial evaluation.
"It's way more cost-effective for our system because you're not having to identify a million dollars of funding, for example, on a capital piece of equipment that we're not going to buy anyway because the physicians don't like it," said James Bruffey, MD, a Scripps orthopedic surgeon.