Supply chain management and keeping healthy levels in hospitals' inventories is a cooperative task among multiple areas, involving effective communication, transparency of information, and time tracking in order to address the organization's internal requisitions that will impact patient care.
Poor monitoring of the organization's processes and requests will affect the patient's experience during their stay. According to a survey, 49% of responders stated that treatments intended for patients had been delayed due to a lack of required supplies, resulting in their rescheduling or cancellation.
Likewise, researchers from the Operations Research for Health Care Institute have described the most important challenges facing the pharmaceutical supply chain, placing lack of coordination at the top of the list. Consecutively, this is followed by inventory management, inadequate information on demand, dependence on human resources, and order management.
Cirrus has created a module with essential functionalities for this control to streamline and digitalize each situation involved in the hospital supply chain and warehouses.
Cirrus ERP: the ideal software for warehouse management in hospitals
Cirrus ERP is a cloud-based module that facilitates the management of inventories, warehouses, and the supply chain of healthcare companies' supplies and assets. These are some of the most common scenarios in which Cirrus fits each organization.
Implementation and initial configuration.
When implementing and adapting Cirrus in a new hospital, a classification of the products in the inventory is carried out.
On the Product Master II screen, the hospital team can register the different types of supplies the hospital counts with, such as storable items, materials, or medications; services including laboratory studies, imaging, procedures, surgeries, medical consultations, and treatments.
This window displays an electronic master catalog of products helpful in purchasing and selling operations linked to inventory accounting information. Likewise, it provides access to relevant data on purchases made from suppliers, reflecting the details of the items in transit or in use by the different areas of the hospital.
Purchase workflow with external suppliers.
Punctual tracking of purchases allows effective logistics in hospital operations. For generating and tracking purchases, Cirrus has various functionalities enabling this workflow:
- Requisition. Hospital staff have options to create requisitions directed towards the designated purchasing team and, on the same screen, track the status of each of these.
- Purchase order. The hospital department designated for commercial operations with suppliers, in addition to collecting all requisitions from other areas, can generate purchase orders that will later be received by the staff of their corresponding service station. These digital documents can include warehouse products, fixed assets, and even charges.
- Reception of material. The assigned team will be able to receive materials from the various orders filled.
Broadly speaking, these are some of the functionalities that have allowed Cirrus clients to maintain a hurdle-free purchasing workflow with suppliers. h this precise detail:
- Communication between areas is improved throughout the requisition and purchasing process.
- The same information is sent to the different departments, avoiding inconsistencies.
- Processes are accelerated by instantly sending purchase documents for products, charges, and fixed assets.
- Updating accounting and inventory information when receiving or returning items.
- Automatic generation of receipt and invoice documents through purchase order and merchandise return through receipt
Internal requests.
As there are steps to keep track of requests to external suppliers, Cirrus also makes visible the assortment of internal requests between areas.
- Product request. The area that requires material can make a requisition that specifies individually or collectively the items to be supplied. Their progress can identify each of these requests.
- Products and trays delivery. Designated users can fill in the requests created by the other areas.
- Confirmation. Users confirm the assortment of products and trays after receiving their order to close requests successfully.
In general, these are some of the functionalities that facilitate the collection of internal requests::
- Electronic registration and control of orders are requested from the warehouse.
- Automatic update of the patient's account statement, with the charges for the products or items included in the request.
- The status of the request is displayed.
- Automatic updating of stocks in inventory reports.
- Management of products in consignment.
- Time optimization.
Punctual reporting
The hospital's executive team needs to know the current scenario of the organization and anticipate upcoming situations. That is why Cirrus has unique options in its Kardex Report section that shows the overview of the warehouse department:
The Kardex report concentrates the data from the windows:
- Reception of material (purchases and returns)
- Patient account charges (sales and cancellations)
- Invoicing, as explained in this article.
- Return of trays
- Product Master
- Physical inventory
- Inventory adjustment
This window allows users to view at a granular level the concepts with which the organization works with, such as service stations, warehouse, product code, product, unit of measure, initial quantity, purchase, returns on purchase, returns on sale, sales, entry due to product transfer, entry due to transfer, due to product returns, adjustment for physical inventory, adjustment for physical inventory (negative or positive), final amount, cost of existence and general existence.
Subrogated or consigned products and services
Consigned products allow flexibility in the availability of supplies used in hospital warehouses. With the special functionalities of Cirrus consignment products, the organization can keep in its inventories the supplies and medications that its daily operation requires and an extra consignment belonging to the supplier. The hospital can store and keep a precise record of its own and consigned items and, at the end of the period designated by the organizations, make sections showing the consigned supplies, those used, the remaining ones, and those that are going to be replaced and the price that the hospital must cover.
Likewise, Cirrus also has functionalities for surrogate products and services. Through agreements with suppliers, the hospital can perform procedures or offer services that the institution does not perform but that are entrusted to a third party, either because it does not have the specialized personnel to perform them because the equipment is under this agreement or because it is not physically carried out within the institution.
Thanks to its particular features, Cirrus allows the counting, collection, and monitoring of substitute products or services. For example, users can charge a specialist's fees, retain that amount, and give it to the doctor with special sections, preventing the hospital from having the responsibility to generate or pay taxes for charges that will not reach its accounting.
The Cirrus ERP module optimizes the administrative processes and those corresponding to the supply chain intuitively, allowing a reduction in operating costs and enhancing patient care during hospitalization.
Experience in hospitals in Mexico, Argentina, Latin America, and Saudi Arabia has helped implement the best solutions through its HIS, EHR, ERP, and RCM products to clients of world-class quality.
