Choosing the Right Healthcare Inventory Management System

Healthcare inventory management systems are software platforms designed to track, manage, and simplify the ordering of medical supplies and equipment. In hospice settings, this software supports the entire lifecycle of durable medical equipment (DME) and other supplies.

Hospice care is unique, because it’s highly personalized and emotionally sensitive. An effective hospice inventory tracking software is critical to providing timely patient care, controlling costs, and staying compliant with healthcare regulations. As a result, a hospice-tailored system is crucial to delivering care in critical moments.

Key Functionalities to Look For

There are many healthcare inventory management systems, but not all are created equal. When choosing a hospice inventory tracking software, look for features like:

• Real-time inventory tracking: Real-time inventory visibility and tracking provide a look at your current stock levels and help prevent you from running out of stock or ordering too much.

• Resupply thresholds: Resupply thresholds give you a notification when stock is running low. This allows you to order critical supplies before they run out, reducing emergencies and avoiding delays in patient care.

• Integration with electronic medical records (EMRs): EMR-integrated inventory systems allow you to coordinate supplies to patient care plans. These systems can often auto-generate orders based on care plan updates.

Depending on your facility and patient needs, you may also want to consider things like centralized reporting, usage analytics and forecasting, integration with vendors, and security assurance.

Unique Hospice Needs in Inventory Systems

Hospice facilities have a specific focus and specific patient care plans, and as a result, these facilities have unique needs beyond standard healthcare facilities, including needs for inventory systems.

Hospice organizations often have patients in multiple settings, like home care, hospice facilities, and inpatient units. This can make coordinating supplies more challenging. Your software should have real-time inventory visibility as well as tracking and access for field staff.

There are often special state and federal regulations that hospice facilities must comply with, and mistakes can lead to audits, fines, or even having your license revoked. To prevent issues, look for software with features like audit-ready records, chain-of-custody tracking, and compliance workflows.

In hospice care, it’s particularly important for resupply to happen consistently. To reduce delays and errors, choose a software that provides resupply scheduling automation. This ensures that supplies are automatically ordered based on current stock or on a predictable schedule. 

Pitfalls of Generic Systems

Most generic healthcare supply chain software is designed for hospitals, clinics, or pharmacies, not hospices. This software can often fail hospice providers who need medical equipment inventory solutions for dynamic and highly personalized healthcare settings. 

Most generic systems are designed around a central, fixed location. They aren’t meant to have supplies dispatched to patient homes or satellite offices. They also don’t allow for adjustments for patients who have been moved between facilities or between their homes and inpatient units.

Hospice needs can also be unpredictable and urgent, two things that don’t mesh well with generic healthcare supply chain software. They’re built around bulk orders, not individual patient needs, and don’t allow for expedited delivery or changes based on EMR updates.

Benefits of Hospice-Specific DME Platforms

Hospice-specific DME platforms offer distinctive advantages built around the operational realities and clinical urgencies of end-of-life care. These platforms provide hospice facilities with comprehensive business management services all in one place to keep operations organized and save time and money. They often provide a “one contract, one invoice, and one system” benefit.

By offering one contract, these platforms simplify procurement and accountability. Working under one unified contract simplifies vendor management and standardizes your service quality. It also makes it easier for staff to use and to know who to contact if something goes awry.

Similarly, having one invoice simplifies the billing process and provides financial clarity to facilities. You also end up with fewer billing errors and reduced work for administrators.

Finally, using one comprehensive system for hospice inventory tracking software allows facilities to focus more on patient-centered ordering. It also provides real-time tracking for supplies, inventory visibility, audit logs, and EMR integration, all in one place.

Training and Implementation Tips

Having a comprehensive, hospice-specific DME platform means nothing if you can’t successfully train your staff and implement the system. Your training needs to be structured, hands-on, and clinically relevant.

Start by engaging your clinical staff early and often. These are the frontline users of the software. If it doesn’t work for them, it’s not going to work at all. The system needs to mirror how they work, so team up with staff members to create clinical workflows and build shortcuts for common supply needs.

Additionally, set up automated reports for things like equipment usage and controlled substances. Hospices face regular audits, and you want to be prepared and precise when audits come around.

Next Steps

Hospice is not just another healthcare environment. It’s urgent, decentralized, and regulated. Generic healthcare systems aren’t designed for the hospice environment and may slow down your ability to respond to patient needs.

Choosing a hospice-specific platform like Qualis provides a return-on-investment that goes beyond cost; it also impacts your staff satisfaction, patient wellbeing, and Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey scores. Contact us today to explore how Qualis' DME platform stacks up against other systems.