The cath lab at Sharp Memorial Hospital (SMH) went from having the most waste of any of Sharp’s cath labs to having the least amount of waste, all in a span of just a few years. To achieve that result, the SMH team leveraged QSight, Owens & Minor’s perpetual inventory management solution. Explore this page to find out how they achieved this and then fill out the form to read the full story.
Reduction In Waste
SMH set a goal of reducing waste by 25%. But what they achieved was something else. Over the course of two years, SMH leveraged QSight to reduce overall waste by an extraordinary 83%, saving over $210,000.
Reduction in waste from expired products
Reduction in waste from “open not used” product
Three Key Steps in reducing waste via QSight
Once the staff at SMH had used QSight to identify the sources of waste, they had to come up with an action plan to address them. They developed a three-step plan, leveraging the functionality at each step.
- Gain control over inventory
The team first had to regain control of their inventory by using QSight to set the right PAR levels and leveraging the advanced reporting tools in QSight to track inventory trends - Reduce the amount of expired product
Secondly, SMH focused on reducing the waste from expiring products. To achieve this, they set-up automatic notifications in QSight that alerted them to expiring product on the shelves so they could pull or use them - Improve supply utilization at the point of care (POC)
Finally, the staff had to reduce waste from “opened and unused” products at the POC. They pulled reports from QSight on product usage and used them to help change the behavior of physicians.
“QSight tells us when a product is expiring at a cadence we set. So now, once we get that notice, we can go to storage, pull the product and either see if we can use it ourselves or see if another Cath Lab can use it”
Donna Dasinger - Cath Lab Manager at SMH
Four key achievements
SHM achieved much more with QSight than just hard dollar cost savings. They also realized four key achievements by leveraging QSight.