Excelsior Springs Hospital

THE EXCELSIOR SPRINGS HOSPITAL STORY

An Opportunity To Automate

ESH is focused on serving the needs of patients in their community through shared values including quality, professionalism, teamwork, community service and leadership. For the supply chain team, delivering optimal care also means supporting the organization with best practice-based processes.

With a goal of building an initial electronic documentation process, the supply chain team retrofitted an existing ticketing system and set-up internal users to create “tickets” to request supplies. This created an electronic record, but also, meant the team had to manually expense supplies and match tickets and invoices in their materials system. This work-around was a step forward, but it didn’t enable full visibility to items being ordered and at what price, nor was there a way to automate and ensure appropriate approval processes.

An Easier, More Effective Solution  

To propel the organization toward greater efficiency and automation, the ESH team selected the Envi® materials management solution. “We wanted to improve the way supply chain supported our patient care goals, ” said Jeremy Bishop, Director of Materials Management. “Our recommendation to implement Envi was based on ease of use, cost effectiveness of the system, and the automation of many processes, especially requisitioning. We’ve used Envi to automate everything end-to-end, from requisitioning to closing requisitions when items are received. It’s been a huge improvement.”

Envi provided the solution, ease of use and automation needed by users in multiple care locations. With a hospital, two clinics and a home health office, supplies are a vital component of delivering patient care in diverse settings.

Creating an Envi Instance Specific to ESH Facilities  

 The first perpetual inventory location created was the main storeroom, enabling Bishop and his team to manage supplies for the entire organization, followed closely by surgery. “One of the surgery staff members manages the inventory; the orders come to us and we place them with vendors, receive the incoming items and put them into their inventory,” said Bishop. “They do the actual management of inventory, scanning items to track usage; we do the orders and receiving.” Outside the OR, departments and team members create requisitions that go through approval routing, then come to the supply chain team to be finalized and either filled from the storeroom or sent to vendors. “The OR and the central supply storeroom are the only perpetual inventories, but we also have areas in ER, nursing and outpatient that we stock every day. A supply chain team members does all the scanning and ordering; when we deliver items, they are expensed directly to the departments. That way, the nurses don’t have to decrement inventory, they can get what they need right off the shelf.” With the entire organization on a single formulary, and approval routing and levels established, end users easily leverage Envi requisitioning templates created for their specific use. “With Envi, we have easy oversight, visibility and approval on all requisitions,” said Bishop. “A department head can advance an order to a senior leader if needed, and each department has visibility to what their end users are requesting.”