Capital inventory accuracy is important for more reasons than just effective patient care. An inaccurate inventory list can leave your hospital open to audit complications. It also creates failures in operational efficiency and future equipment planning. Plus, removed assets inflate insurance and service costs if not updated in a master ledger.
Manage Your Risks
With such tight operating margins, American hospitals are constantly looking for ways to improve finances and operations. Let’s look at some of these risks and how to manage them.
1. Complicated Financial Reporting
Reliable inventory records simplify mandated reviews and financial reporting requirements. Clean records also reduce headaches in meeting generally accepted accounting principles and passing government accounting requirements.
2. Decreased Operational Efficiency
By assigning responsibility and ownership for every asset, your entire team can improve operational efficiency. This is important to optimize asset utilization, which often hovers around 42% in average American hospitals.
Ideal inventory management systems should simplify the process of establishing accountability and control. Look for one that connects all teams and all departments directly to a single master ledger.
3. Inflated Insurance & Service Costs
Make sure to keep the right insurance policies. This requires both specific values and total insurable values, supported with Proof of Loss documents. Both insurance expenses and maintenance service contracts can become inflated with inaccurate inventory records.
Many hospitals also suffer from disjointed records between biomed and finance. Tools to keep these ledgers coordinated are essential. Keeping finance and accounting updated on true inventory helps accurately assess and track both specific values and total insurable values.
4. Inefficient Budget Distribution & Capital Expenditure Planning
Asset planning and capital budgets are difficult to assess with inaccurate inventory lists and incomplete data. Comprehensive and accurate records enhance your capital equipment planning and replacement forecasts.
Update Inaccurate Inventory without Disrupting Patient Care
If you’re struggling with an inaccurate inventory and don’t have the time or resources to fix it, we can help. BidMed offers full-service inventory assessments, as well as technology for your team to complete self-led internal updates.
Assessment & Reconciliation Services
Our most-requested service includes full facility (or health system) inventory reconciliations. Our team of specialists arrives at your location and processes all capital equipment on-site, whether in use or in storage.
The Helix Mobile app enables teams to complete these inventory projects 2.5x faster than a traditional barcode scanner and laptop. Our tools and experience processing live patient settings also ensure we capture all necessary details. This includes multiple required ID tags; make, model, and descriptions of equipment; and photos of important information on all items.
Data automatically syncs to our cloud-based inventory management software, Workflow+. Equipment found on-site can also be compared to a pre-loaded, existing inventory record. This makes processing faster and provides a final inventory accuracy report.
Inventory accuracy reports assess equipment according to three categories:
- verified (found on-site AND on original list)
- new add (found on-site but NOT on original list)
- unverified (NOT found on-site but on original list)
These reports empower teams to identify and improve workflow breakdowns. They can also be shared with other departments, like finance and accounting, to update external records.
Data Standardization
Nomenclature inconsistencies make a database extremely difficult to use. For example, “Medtronic/Covidien FT10” and “Valleylab ft10” represent the same equipment. However, these will not show up together in a single search query. Standardizing data like this exponentially improves operational efficiency as well as inventory accuracy.
This data standardization service can be paired with inventory assessment services, or contracted separately to clean an existing list.
Avoid Recurring Inaccurate Inventory Issues
Many of our customers have done dozens of inventory assessments over the years. The biggest reason is a breakdown in disposition process compliance, leading to chronically inaccurate inventory lists.
Inventory management software like Workflow+ simplifies disposition processes, making them less disruptive for busy teams to follow. Tiered user permissions, custom dashboards, and automated notifications connect key stakeholders and improve transparency.
Capital Planning Services
The beginning and end of equipment lifecycles involve capital planning — an essential step to balancing hospital operational costs. Workflow+ not only keeps inventory accurate, it also helps retain value or increase returns on capital dispositions.
Certain Workflow+ subscription tiers connect your facility to a Private Exchange network, optimizing internal equipment transfers. These internal transfers retain value within your system.
Users can also request fair market value reports to determine ideal disposition methods. Secondary market values, especially direct sales to end-users, often exceed OEM trade-in values.
Our third tier of Workflow+ connects subscribers to our hospital-exclusive Exchange. There, hospitals connect directly with other facilities who can use the equipment. Direct sales both increase sale values and decrease purchase prices — removing added third party expenses.
If resale and OEM trade-ins are not an option, FMV reports also provide documentation donations and loss write-offs.
Fix Inaccurate Inventory Lists for Good
Start over with an inventory list you can trust, and move forward with software and processes that don’t disrupt your team’s true priorities. It’s all possible with a combination of BidMed’s software and services.