At the current rate of change, the path to sustainability in healthcare requires supply chain stakeholders to reimagine what’s possible when data is unlocked to its full potential.
Today’s health systems and their partners face unprecedented financial pressures, driven in part by high inflation and often severe disruptions in the availability of labor, medications, and medical supplies. By the same token, healthcare providers want to reduce the impact of product shortages, understand causes for disruptions, and partner with manufacturers to work collaboratively toward solutions.
Manufacturers and distributors, for their part, are looking for greater visibility into provider needs for different categories of products. To move from transactional relationships to strategic partnerships, these healthcare trading partners seek transparency related to scheduling, patient volumes, and protocol changes that can impact demand.
All parties involved are concerned about reducing stress and lowering costs, and the key to their success lies in data. Simply having data is not the solution – in today’s world, information is abundant. What’s needed is intelligent, purpose-built technology for analyzing and using data in ways that enable the healthcare supply chain to improve visibility, decrease disruptions, and enhance customer support in meaningful ways at every level.
“Better visibility would be a big step in the right direction. In the long term, we need to strengthen relationships with our key suppliers and identify what information we could share with them to provide better insight into our needs.”
Solving the supply chain visibility challenge
Historically, different health system departments have managed their own budgets and inventory. Today, more and more health systems have the vision to create a shared services supply chain organization where supply management is efficient, smart, and rational.
With the shared services approach, it is critical to have clear visibility into future demand requirements to proactively prepare without overstocking and putting the health system in a cash flow dilemma. The ability to predict demand with precision provides opportunities to optimize PAR levels, stock returns, and procurement strategies while keeping a close watch on critical products.
Top five benefits of optimal product demand predictions:
- More time for providers to take the right action at the right moment
- Potential reduction in back order management
- Fewer negative rebound effects of managing returns
- Lower risk of inventory expiring before use
- Decreased physical space required for inventory storage at the health system
“When a product is on back order but a true understanding of demand is not available, an enormous amount of effort is invested by value analysis, procurement, and data management teams to find alternative solutions. This process is very costly. Often, once a substitute is ordered, a notification comes from the principal supplier that stock is now available for the original item, so we place an order to procure exactly what the provider wanted. This then starts the whole process of returning the substitute, which can be long and tedious.”
Supply chain disruption management: An exhausting process
Whether it’s due to delivery delays, sudden changes in demand, or back orders from manufacturers and distributors, supply chain disruptions can cause delayed procedures – especially when the situation involves products that have no approved substitutions. When therapies and treatments are delayed, patient care and overall health outcomes are impacted.
Furthermore, internal customers (e.g., clinicians) frequently ask questions regarding the status of their requisitions. The supply chain customer service process can be chaotic and overwhelming at times, specifically in times of shortages and disruptions. This leaves clinicians frustrated when their questions are not answered quickly and/or the supply chain team seems non-transparent. In today’s era of labor shortages and staff burnout, it is now more important than ever to provide rapid, reliable, and helpful responses to all inventory inquiries.
And yet, business support analysts receive thousands of supply-related customer service requests annually from both internal customers and external partners, and it can take several hours to respond to each request. Accurate answers often require consultation with four to five different information sources or with the supplier, and sometimes a question must be rerouted to a subject matter expert, creating bottlenecks in the process. In an effort to facilitate data accessibility, access to order requisition systems and other information sources has sometimes been consolidated for simplified access, requiring users to have expert training to interact with the different systems to find the answers.
Smart healthcare leaders invest in smart solutions
Increasingly, hospital and health system leaders are recognizing the problems described above and making smart technology investments to solve them. According to a 2023 survey of healthcare provider executives by Bain & Company and KLAS Research:
- Information technology and software have emerged as a top strategic priority for the majority of healthcare providers. Nearly one in five say it is now their highest priority.
- Labor shortages, product/supply cost inflation, and wage inflation combine to account for nearly one-third (31 percent) of the main reasons providers are spending more on IT.
- The top three AI use case priorities for hospitals and health systems are clinical decision support tools (29 percent), predictive analytics and risk stratification (25 percent), and clinical workflow optimization and automation (23 percent).
Additionally, a 2023 survey by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and KLAS Research shed light on the underlying objectives that drive health system investments in smart digital tools. As a testament to the power of intelligent technology in providing benefits beyond operational efficiency, the supply chain was shown to have a growing influence on IT investments. In fact, for the purposes of supply chain management:
- 18 percent of respondents are now using predictive analytics
- 12 percent use machine learning
- 10 percent use artificial intelligence
The power of improved data interpretation, speed, visualization, optimization
Health system leaders and managers have enormous volumes of data at their fingertips, but many are unsure how to effectively leverage it to glean valuable, actionable insights. Web-based AI platforms within a secure cloud architecture provide the infrastructure and computational intelligence necessary for better understanding and communication between the parties using the outputs. Take these four areas of optimization, for example:
Simplifying access and increasing the speed of access
- Secure, robust architecture allows importing and exporting data from multiple information sources (ERP, ADT, surgeon schedules, etc.).
- Cloud-based data hosting speeds up data handling.
Data interpretation (machine learning cognitive assistance)
- Machine learning makes forecasts, provides data insights, and draws user attention to important parameters and unusual trends. This goes beyond typical business intelligence solutions by adding interpretation capabilities.
- Raw data is transformed into precise, easy-to-understand forecasts and narratives.
- Complex analytics and recommendations are factored in so the user can make informed decisions. It accelerates the decision-making process and leads to important savings.
Data visualization
- Modern, web-based visual tools provide a simpler, more user-friendly experience compared to table-based designs found in ERP systems.
- With data-driven insights available at one glance, users can see the big picture – which makes complex or multi-faceted business decisions easier to determine.
- Sliding tools, for example, are data visualization techniques that allow providers to see future demand and past demand for a particular product with ease. For manufacturers, data visualization tools can enable them to aggregate demand from multiple health systems for a particular product category or business segment.
Optimization and automation
- Optimized procurement based on demand and consumption forecasts, the forecasting and procurement processes can be automated, and the automated procurement process can be integrated with an ERP system.
Revolutionizing supply chain management with decision support driven by patient demand
While the challenges for healthcare supply chains are abundant, there is now groundbreaking, purpose-built technology that streamlines access to key insights needed to transform decision-making and operations for a more sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective future. Through the MUUTAA™ machine learning platform and artificial intelligence tools, a wealth of information that was previously unavailable to healthcare supply chain teams and their business partners is unlocked and made actionable with remarkable simplicity.
Going far beyond the demand forecasting functionality of an ERP system – which relies on limited data – MUUTAA technology integrates many additional data sources to provide truer insight into demand. While some market solutions provide visualization capabilities, they do not offer the interpretation strength of MUUTAA’s library of algorithms. Furthermore, MUUTAA’s specialized data management services identify all appropriate data sources and prepare them for machine learning capabilities, eliminating a common pain point for supply chain professionals.
Machine learning platform
The MUUTAA.ml machine learning platform provides a complete and agile set of AI-powered tools for supply chain optimization. These tools are implemented as a set of templated AI-powered tasks, which can be run with a single click on the user’s data. Tasks include forecasting, optimization and recommendation, data analysis, and anomaly detection. Each task can also be customized to meet specific user needs. Data can be easily imported or exported to various business intelligence tools and ERP systems, and the platform analyzes vast amounts of data and combines numerous data sources to identify correlations that previously went unnoticed.
Robust data management
MUUTAA.ml makes it easy to annotate, align, and valorize data. Built-in data services include data transfer tools, data central store, and security tools involving de-identification. Unlike single-source ERP forecasts, MUUTAA’s data management specialists align data sources inside and outside the realm of the healthcare supply chain to become meaningful and drive value. MUUTAA.ml is a cloud-based solution for world-class architecture and security with the turnkey convenience of AI-as-a-Service. The centralized data storage is hosted on Amazon Web Services and meets security requirements for data locality, protection, and confidentiality.
Demand forecasting and optimization, including replenishment
MUUTAA’s proprietary forecasting tools combine the advantages of cutting-edge statistical and deep learning techniques. The DemandAMP+®application delivers precise forecasts for any type of input time series and provides detailed information about historical demand, combined purchasing, consumption, and operational data. Proprietary algorithms evaluate confidence intervals for each forecast, taking into account all sources of uncertainty. MUUTAA solutions also provide valuable insights into historical data, such as anomaly detection or safety stock evaluation. Together, all these insights support highly informed decision-making, resulting in inventory optimization through precise purchasing and replenishment recommendations. It has never been easier to know what to order and when.
Conversational agent
On the MUUTAA.ml platform, users can interact with a conversational agent powered by large language models. The conversational agent provides a human-like interaction experience that simplifies and accelerates usage parameters of the input data sets. For example, it provides task execution results, data insights, and statistics in a convenient text format. The agent can also be queried in a chat form to provide specific information.
Far-Reaching Benefits: The Voice of Customers
As the innovators behind the MUUTAA.ml platform and the healthcare supply chain’s first and only AI solution that focuses on patient-driven demand, MUUTAA listens carefully to customer feedback – and here’s what the market has to say:
For supply chain logistics and operations, users of MUUTAA’s technology say it is very beneficial to have fast and clear visibility into order patterns – the ability to see where, in the past, inventory shortages have prompted subsequent over-ordering due to a limited sense of true demand. These insights empower them to “smooth out” those costly order patterns. The platform’s precise predictions spotlight opportunities for cost savings (inventory reduction and reduction in expired products), time savings (less time spent receiving inventory, putting it away, and managing returns), and space savings (fewer items to warehouse and replenish through the health system’s distribution center).
For supply chain administration, users say the visual presentation of the data makes it easy to understand, and it presents a very factual, compelling story that will continue to become more refined as additional data is layered in, such as case volumes and utilization data. With easy accessibility to this data, there is an opportunity to assist in a cultural change – one in which procurement management can have better discussions with end-user representatives at a certain interval and eventually trickle down over time. Procurement leadership leverages automated alerts such as “check usage” and “check volume” to focus attention where needed.
For supply chain information management, users are leveraging the power of machine learning and the symbiotic relationship to data it provides by removing human bias. MUUTAA technology reduces risk by simplifying access to the data required to support supply chain decisions, e.g., reducing PAR levels for cost savings. Furthermore, the automation of mundane manual tasks frees up valuable data analytics resource time that can be reallocated to other priorities.
For clinician satisfaction and patient safety, care providers with the responsibility of preparing a procedure are concerned about having the required medical supplies based on physician preferences and procedure protocols. Armed with knowledge of procedures scheduled and visibility into inventory locations, users know what is required to care for the patient, so uncertainty is reduced. Additionally, cumulative forecasts provided for each product in DemandAMP+ ®give confidence to the clinical team that the predictions provided are accurate.
For enhanced provider-supplier relations, users say MUUTAA technology’s bi-directional data sharing and transparency benefit business partners on both sides of the supply/demand equation. For example, with greater visibility into demand, manufacturers can improve their production planning, while providers gain a clearer understanding of disruptions and delivery schedules that ultimately affords more time to find alternatives. Enhanced data sharing between partners enables a more strategic approach to the business relationships at the core of successful supply chain outcomes.
For the supply chain help desk, users say the MUUTAA.ai conversational agent delivers the following benefits:
- Less effort is required of business support analysts because the conversational agent simplifies the analyses and interpretations necessary to manage the complexity of different requests.
- Processing time per request is decreased from several hours to just minutes.
- The ability to respond to requests and queries faster – and with greater accuracy – improves work relations and service to both internal customers and external business partners.
- Time spent on training users for different systems is decreased.
Supporting the shift to sustainable, value-based healthcare
As the health industry continues its transformation from volume to value, MUUTAA is revolutionizing healthcare supply chain management with decision support driven by patient demand.
MUUTAA technologies provide the ability to analyze all products, processes, and providers involved in every episode of care. The solutions are expertly designed to improve supply chain efficiency by solving real-world challenges with forecasting, scenario planning, sourcing, pricing, procurement, substitutions, inventory management, and more – for all your medication and medical supply needs.
Step into the future of healthcare supply chain management with MUUTAA. To explore our groundbreaking approach or request a demonstration, visit muutaa.com.
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