When Hurricane Helene struck the North Carolina at the end of September, he caused more than $ 59 billion in damages.
Among these damaged companies, there was one of the main American manufacturers of Liquids IV, used to rehydrate patients and give them medication. The resulting shortage forced hospitals to preserve and reduce their use of IV liquids, which led to canceled surgeries and delays in treatment.
These hospital stock disturbances have long been difficult to predict and difficult to sail for hospitals. At the same time, keeping too much a given element at hand is a waste. In 2019, hospitals spent around $ 25.7 billion for the supplies they did not need, the Navigant consulting company found in a study of more than 2,100 hospitals – approximately $ 12.1 million for an average hospital.
To reduce waste, while ensuring that providers have the medical supplies they need, certain leading hospital systems use automation, predictive analysis and other forms of artificial intelligence to manage the inventory.
Business Insider asked managers of the three -system supply chain – the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic and Rush University Medical Center – on how they use automatic learning, generator, sensors and robotics to anticipate shortages and help contraction and order.
The following has been modified for duration and clarity.
Business Insider: What are the most effective and most innovative ways you use of AI?
Joe Dudas, President of the Mayo Clinic supply chain strategy: we have deployed an autonomous delivery and an achievement of the robotic warehouse – robots that choose orders.
We make our algorithms progress so that self-replenishment is even more precise. We also use AI to explore savings opportunities and understand the sustainability of these opportunities over the duration of an agreement, based, for example, on demand.
We do advanced analyzes in high spending categories – we just become much smarter about what is happening with a little more precision. Even our management of expenses, we are considering profits and loss and supply expenses, to understand what is happening in a budgetary perspective. Based on the present and what has happened in the past, we can look forward to a certain degree of precision.
Geoff Gates, Senior Director of Cleveland Clinic’s supply chain management: in some of our tools, instead of having someone click on many buttons and type data in 20 or more fields, for example, we were able to automate this process with AI, which saves employees 20 minutes each time. These are the tasks that are the greatest advantage from the point of view of pure efficiency – they allow people to focus on other things.
We also use AI for document recognition and have used it to manage invoices via our ERP stock management system for four years. If a representative of the medical supply has an invoice sheet which must be processed – to create an order form – the representative submits it, and our tool automatically creates a requisition.
With distribution, our goal is to create a better view of what we have in our health system and the hospital. Our goal with the main suppliers is to be able to see what supplies they have in their warehouses and predict disturbances. For example, if we can see that a supplier has no shipping, the system would alert us that we will have a problem in two weeks.
Jeremy Strong, vice-president of the supply chain of the Rush University Medical Center: For stock management, we have weighting bins systems in all heavy volume areas. When a nurse comes out something and does something, we know it.
Once we have implemented this, we could start to be proactive. We have a system that includes our distributor data on the inventory entering their distribution center. They can see where our use models change. Then the AI reviews it all. A backpacker backwards creates alerts when automatic supply filling levels through the system are low, the inventory is low at the distribution center or that manufacturers’ shipments take more time than expected. We can anticipate that we are going to run out in a week or have a backward problem.
We also use it in contract management. When a contract is responsible, AI will send it to the category manager with a summary and potential clauses to be examined. It can also automatically send contracts to the cybersecurity team for approval. If it contains information on patients, it sends it to risk lawyers. If he has compensation, he sends it to our regular lawyers.
What are the advantages of the automation that your system has made?
DUDAS: Our automation gives us an agility. We can see things earlier and adapt more quickly because of our technology but also because of our talent.
Someone asked me the other day: “Where are you going?” I said, “We do not progress. We follow all the curve balls that we are launched on a daily basis.”
Gates: At this point, the tools have touched almost everyone in the supply chain. Even a specific process that has no impact on one or two people who carried out these tasks allows us to be more effective and precise.
Strong: The objective was to go from responsiveness and extinguish fires to be more predictive, to prevent fires from happening, to see things in advance and to be more effective.
We have also accelerated the examination of the contracts. We have reduced the time necessary to revise them in half and has more than doubled the number of exams that each contract obtains.
What advice would you give for other companies interested in implementing AI to rationalize the inventory?
Dudas: Recognize that you can’t do everything yourself. Even as large as our organization is not large enough. The scale is your friend in the supply chain.
Gates: Some things were not necessarily the greatest opportunities to start, but these are low -risk processes that have given us the skills necessary to take advantage of AI.
We focus the most on the search for the right solution for the problem rather than forcing a solution.
Strong: The best tasks or processes to fight against people who are repetitive or require to shoot and summarize data from several digital sources. Approaching them and you can acquire efficiency gains, improve productivity and be proactive.
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