In hospice and care settings, money savings should never come from shortages and sacrifices in quality. Every dollar saved should translate into better bedside care for patients and a better experience for professionals.
Effective hospice inventory management requires balancing cost control with meeting patient needs on time. Waste from overbuying and slow deliveries, among dozens of other problems, can slowly but surely eat into your agency’s budget. And that’s not to mention staff time wasted and the rising frustration across the board.
Across the health care industry, smarter supply chains can be the stepping stone to sizable savings without harming care quality. Effective, centralized workflows are the key to what really matters: getting your patients the right items at the right time.
Waste is, more often than not, a predictable aspect of inventory management. As with most things in health care, it’s impossible to pinpoint a single root cause for these issues — but there are a few common challenges.
DME can easily slip through the cracks without disciplined controls and workflows. Overstocking “just in case,” expired equipment, poor tracking, and vendor inflexibility are clear examples of how DME inventories can go wrong.
These issues are far from abstract, causing significant financial problems, delays in care delivery, excessive paperwork, and damage to your reputation.
Inventory waste drains as much time as it drains funds.
Dollars tied up in unused, duplicate, expired, or otherwise unusable DME and supplies translate directly into tighter budgets for other areas in your hospice. At the same time, reordering processes and dispute management can slow down staff who need those extra hours to focus on more important tasks.
Health systems and centers that tighten supply chains will uncover savings opportunities both in terms of money and time. Less waste means more efficient operations, directly translating to clinicians working with the right items for patients who can’t wait any longer.
The first challenge of fixing your DME management is identifying those seemingly invisible supply chain issues. The second is, of course, optimizing your inventory.
Start with vendor accountability: Set realistic expectations for delivery, retrieval, and issue resolution. Not every vendor will be able to meet your demands, so avoiding single-source bottlenecks through a Robust DME Vendor Network is a key piece of the puzzle.
Add real-time tracking to ensure deliveries get to your hospice in time, and use centralized reporting platforms to spot slow-moving items.
Finally, try to forecast the demand of specific items to adjust orders and stock ahead of time. Seasonal trends and periodic replenishment, for example, can show you what you need — before you actually need it.
Centralized, integrated systems reduce manual entries and the avoidable errors they imply.
The value of technology in inventory control is its reach, connecting teams, sites, departments, and vendors under a centralized platform. A panoramic picture aligns all decisions with direct needs and preferences, reducing guesswork and overstocking.
At the same time, the resulting metrics create feedback loops and allow visibility into current and future trends, allowing you to adjust accordingly. Technology is the gap between efficient hospice inventory without waste and a hospice logistic model that doesn’t slow care delivery.
Opening vendor access cuts excess stock by replacing redundant inventory with on-demand, timely fulfillment.
When Crossroads Hospice shifted to Qualis’ vendor-neutral model, DME management showed improvement in nearly every area. Crossroads has, over the past six years, experienced a 30% increase in on-time deliveries, a 40% reduction in communication-related delays, a boost to CAHPS scores, and much more.
The idea behind it is straightforward: Instead of relying on a single vendor, hospices take on 6,300 vendor touchpoints nationwide. This means, in essence, that vendor shortages or delays in deliveries can be solved quickly without breaking contracts.
Qualis replaces fragmented spreadsheets and overflowing inboxes with efficient hospice inventory management.
With Centralized Reporting, staff can track DME hospice logistics in one view. A structured DME Evaluation shows pain points in your current workflow and solutions for hospice supply optimization. Behind the scenes, our DME vendor network supports routing by availability and cost — ensuring you never have to rely on a single option again.
At the same time, all of this means that data will be there for you to analyze at any point in time. We want to support better decisions for your hospice and your DME needs, and information can make the difference between waste and efficient operations.
Reducing waste goes way beyond just cost exercises: It’s about improving care.
Data-driven, centralized workflows and processes free up your budget and your staff’s time to focus on bedside care. By unifying all your DME logistics into one platform, you can cut waste without sacrificing the dignity and comfort of your patients.
The result? A cycle of lowering unexpected costs and delays while amplifying clinical capacity. Schedule a call with Qualis to explore inventory solutions that keep costs low and care standards high.