Supply chain improvement project yields positive results for Kansas and Missouri hospitals
A supply chain improvement project involving 12 hospitals in southwestern Missouri and southeastern Kansas yielded reduced spending on clinical products and improved infection control efforts.
The hospitals are participants of the Greater Ozarks Sourcing Collaborative, a regional purchasing network formed through VHA Inc., an Irving, Texas-based national group purchasing organization of not-for-profit healthcare facilities.
According to VHA, since January of 2008 the Kansas and Missouri hospitals have collaborated to review and standardize around 16 infection control products, resulting in total savings of more than $369,000. The materials managers from each hospital gather regularly to discuss product standardization and ways to obtain lower prices through smarter contracting.
"The network provides a forum to get infection control professionals together to look at products that all of us may not know about and to ultimately decide what's best for the patients," said Ann Davy, infection prevention officer at Freeman Health System in Joplin, Mo.
Freeman Health saw pneumonias drop from 13.15 percent per 1,000 ventilator days in September 2008 to 0 percent in April 2009 as a result of participation in the project. Bloodstream infections fell from 3.25 percent per 1,000 line days in December 2008 to 0 percent in April 2009.
VHA says network members evaluated infection control products, engaging nurses and infection control professionals to validate the value of their recommended product changes and measure the potential impact on quality of care.
The materials managers formed an infection prevention sub-group to work simultaneously with the operations team, in order to speed up the product conversion process. Participants say the two groups' efforts created a fast track methodology that accelerated product conversion rates and created a platform for discussing how the hospitals would make better use of infection control products.
"Our guiding principle was to recommend products that drove best practice in infection prevention," said Teri Koch, director of infection control/employee health/education at McCune-Brooks Regional Hospital in Carthage, Mo. "With payers and regulators withholding reimbursement for certain types of hospital-acquired infections, our work was viewed as essential, and the fact that we were collaborating with other hospitals to identify best practices validated the decisions we made across all the hospitals."
Participation in the project led McCune-Brooks to experience a drop in surgical infection rates in 2008 from 4.5 infections per 100 surgeries to one infection per 100 surgeries. The rate continued to decrease in 2009, down to 0.5 infections per 100 surgeries during the first six months of the year.
