Implantable devices are becoming more common every day. From the stents that keep arteries open, to gel breast implants, to defibrillators, to devices small enough to travel through our bodies for diagnostic reasons, they comprise a whopping $40 billion a year industry.
But healthcare experts now think the money spent on healthcare devices may offer the industry “a large-scale opportunity for cost-savings to invest back into patient care,” according to an Associated Press story. That is, if processes can be automated.
"We need to take the cost and waste out of healthcare and we need to do it whether the government says to do it or not," said Dale Locklair, vice president of procurement and construction, McLeod Health, referring to the Affordable Care Act that mandates many new processes for the healthcare industry, who spoke on a recent panel, in the story.
But before that can happen, the implantable device market requires massive change on the side of both providers and suppliers, experts agree.
What’s holding everything up is that the management of implantable devices is a significantly manual process at most hospitals today. "The hidden costs really add up exponentially when you think of the impact on the process and the fact that the implantables are often related to the most invasive procedures that we do," said Nancy LeMaster, vice president, supply chain operations, BJC Healthcare, in the story.
"From a patient perspective, the idea that we are tracking implantables manually is just unthinkable," she told the AP. "In this highly technical medical field, when we are doing these very invasive and amazing procedures that are saving lives, it must become a priority that we fully automate these systems.”
“When you look at the manual processes we have, they give us nothing but problems,” said Locklair. “We need to take what is wasteful out of the system and put it back in the system to do something meaningful and beneficial. The focus can return to patient outcomes versus broken processes."
The FDA requirestracking method that must follow the device though the manufacturing process and distribution of the device to medical facilities. Imagine all the sheets of paper – and the possibility of mistakes – when that is done manually. that all device manufacturers develop a
To start to meet that need, GHX announced in February that the company is developing a comprehensive supply chain solution for physician preference items (PPI) and implantable medical devices.
From safety (medical devices have the same level of approval standards as Chinese toys) to assessing the workability of these devices, it’s imperative that more must be done. We all know the failure rate of medical devices like metal-on-metal hip implants and the complications they can cause.
Although finding specific numbers is difficult, there is no doubt that the number of patients with implantable medical devices has increased markedly over the past several decades. Is this due to poor governmental oversight? Flawed manufacturing processes? Too many hands in the pot?
All agree that regulating the number and variety of medical devices is a huge job. But GHX is on it, with a solution for the implantable device supply chain solution that includes capturing data from product purchase to product usage at the point of care, and creating capture capability while enabling accurate billing, purchasing and inventory tracking, all of which could allow providers and manufacturers to jointly automate shared business processes for greater efficiencies – something the industry must really do before its manual processes result in more device injuries and even deaths.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
