Voices of Healthcare Cloud brings you “Healthcare Device Manufacturing Inventory Management”

We are so excited to be back! We took a much-needed break, but now we have some great content and speakers lined up over the next few months. We have topics around clinician burnout & workforce crisis in healthcare, Nuance is going to make an appearance, and we have a few customers to speak about technology innovations that have impacted their business outcomes.

If you are new to our series or need a refresher; Voices of Healthcare Cloud is a webinar series hosted by myself, @Vasu Sharma & @Joshua Thompson. My name is Shelly Avery, I am currently a Dir, Healthcare Specialist for Health and Life Sciences focusing on the largest Payor and Provider customers in the US, Vasu is a Sr Customer Success Manager for Microsoft 365 for Health and Life Sciences & Josh is a Sr Account Executive for Healthcare. The goal of this webinar series is to showcase how Healthcare is seeing positive business and clinical outcomes with cloud technology.

We will be bringing new and creative solutions to you at least once a month, so we hope you tune in live or catch the on-demand recording after the session is completed.

If you want to get direct invites for these sessions, you can let us know by filling out this form.

Hopefully, you joined our last few webinars on these topics, if not click the link for more info: 

• Physician Referral and Relationship Management
• Patient Referral Automation
• Data Driven Patient Engagement
• Supply chain transformation in Health
• Improve Supply Chain to Drive Higher ROI & Patient Satisfaction

For this session, Michael Hobbs MBA, a Senior Technology Specialist at Microsoft, will discuss medical device manufacturer inventory management. Suppliers managing their implants (drug-eluting stents, pacemakers, hips, knees) and mobile devices (lasers, IVUS) within a hospital is critical to day-to-day operations. For example, most medical device manufacturers lose sight of high-cost implants and mobile devices once the items leave their distribution centers, resulting in no visibility, inventory expiration, inventory excess, products lost, and overnight freight expenses. The unfortunate result... increased cost to the healthcare system and patients.  

But now, with Microsoft’s platform empowering next-gen visibility to medical device manufacturers, we see many benefits, such as:    

• Visibility of inventory (implants, pacemakers, etc.) all the way through patient usage
• The ability for device manufacturers to automate inventory of trunk stock and inventory of hospital consignment
• The ability for device manufacturers to track mobile devices located within a hospital 
• The ability for device manufacturers to utilize FEFO, eliminate product expiration, excess inventory, etc.
• AI/ML decision making, demand planning & supply forecasting

 
This session happened in the past, please see the recording here, and the resources shared during the session down below. 

During the session we have many questions, so we listed them here with answers, thanks for watching. 

1. If you can manage the asset can you schedule it as well for better asset scheduling or lab schedule? Yes, beyond managing the asset, we can implement ways to better schedule assets for lab testing or use in the OR. Whatever the use case, we can help automate this process. Further detail would be required on the specific use case. 
2. Does this produce reports such as Demand Planning for us to save money and time? We could provide reports in different forms, but via Demand Planning, Planning optimization will remove the load of master planning from the ERP system and provide a constantly updated dynamic plan that will provide real-time insight into requirement changes and potentially enable savings by reduction of the total lead time, as new demands are detected and managed earlier. 
3. How do you track systems in the field globally and understand what is utilized out of the implant bank? We can provide the inventory location based on the tracking tags, whether it be RFID or Blue Tooth. This information can be presented via a web-based application or a Power App via MS Dynamics.  
4. How have you addressed physical challenges - battery life and connectivity within a hospital? The tag for assets are monitored via a dashboard. This solution could be addressed end-to-end or managed by the customer. Issues like battery life or connectivity are managed via the solution itself. Notifications are issued when battery life is set to expire.   
5. What are some of the challenges you've had with implementing the system? The challenges have been the type, size of the device, number of assets, and how to recognize each asset (RFID, BT, Wireless, Cellular, Hybrid).  Every customer is unique, thus we address every requirement. Therefore, we recommend an assessment of the current assets/inventory.  
6. How popular is the Computer Vision solution? The devices seem to be of the same dimensions. The solution is to grow market share year by year. Computer Vision is now being adopted, the challenge is the recognition of devices and dimensions. Computer Vision utilizes AI and machine learning to derive the different dimensions of an asset. 
7. Do you have any used cases with the LED RFID Tags? Yes, the use case is to locate any asset or pick to light, the solution is tag agnostic which can also work with LED RFID tags.  
8. You mentioned inventory management / re-ordering logic.  Where is this logic defined, and are there standard “modules” on the platform to handle various inventory management methodologies? The logic of re-order levels and inventory management is defined by a user with the right privileges to configure or set up with the ERP. Best business practices are out of the box and come standard. A deeper dive discussion will be required to better understand the different methodologies you require, please. 
9. With the reduction in NWC mentioned was this done by optimizing turns of systems or was this done by eliminating systems in the field that had dead stock that was unable to utilize? We accomplished this by optimizing the systems. We did not eliminate any systems. We enhanced the capabilities and automated workflow. 
10. Could this be used for devices such as infusion pumps and also are laptops? Yes, we’ve deployed this solution for infusion pumps, laptops, and many other asset types. 

As always, we will record the session and post the recording afterward for future consumption. We have a new landing page for this series, so favorite or follow https://aka.ms/VoicesofHealthcareCloud to make sure you never miss a future session.

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Thanks for reading, Shelly Avery | Email, LinkedIn