Eliminating the Medical Device Black Hole by Transforming

Gina anderson

For many medical device manufacturers and healthcare systems, a proven path to better sales and strengthened physician relationships lies in improving control of the medical device journey. Mareo McCracken, the Chief Customer Officer at Movemedical, recently shared his insights on how to address these problems by fundamentally reimagining the medical device supply chain.

Movemedical partners with medical device companies, hospitals, surgeons, distributors, and logistics providers to unify the surgery case management and device supply chain process. “These medical device companies have some severe supply chain issues,” McCracken says, “They’ve always been able to deliver, but it’s always been driven by inefficient manual processes.” By offering medical providers an easy-to-use digital platform that is paired with logistics partnerships to facilitate the inventory fulfillment process, Movemedical streamlines and automates those once time-consuming manual operations in the industry.

“Before COVID-19, everything was so manual; you would have a sales representative going into a hospital to verify that inventory was there,” explains McCracken. “Now, hospitals don’t allow sales reps to come in as often or there are travel restrictions, so it’s encouraging a lot of digital transformation. Once-manual systems that had always worked well enough are now being automated and in turn, increasing in efficiency and eliminating what was once described as the “medical black hole.”

“What typically happens is when a finished medical device leaves the manufacturer’s warehouse, it goes into this big black hole until it is inserted into a patient,” McCracken shares, “Most people don’t have the visibility into where the inventory is or what has happened to it.” 

The complexity of tracking medical device inventory has been exceptionally difficult in the past, but a comprehensive inventory management platform that tracks inventory of all suppliers, at every stage of the journey, while keeping it close to its final point of use and reassigning it automatically has been the key to success.

Each year, $5 billion is lost in the medical device field thanks to expired, lost, or uncaptured products.

“A key issue has been the waste management, which is a huge expense for these companies,” says McCracken. “Issues like over-shipping, expiration, and proper reallocation of products is all contributing to this monumental cost for the providers, and the goal of efficient logistics is to solve a lot of this waste.”

Third-party logistics carriers (3PLs) like GEODIS City Delivery can help eliminate this waste. GEODIS’ inventory management solutions work seamlessly to provide real-time data on products, no matter where they are in their journey. With an expansive global logistics footprint and decades of experience behind their solutions, GEODIS City Delivery can offer unparalleled support and continuous supply chain improvements for ultimate efficiency.

The cost savings associated with this transformation speaks for itself. McCracken shares, “One of our partners has been able to reduce their expired inventory in the field by 30%, which reduced their risk by an incredible amount, while another partner was able to reduce their inventory in the field by 25%, which is essentially enabling this business value to be repurposed in other places.”

But the cost savings isn’t the only valuable part of this agile supply chain transformation. “Another partners’ sales reps were actually able to save on average fifteen hours every week that was once being wasted on busywork.” And that gift of time for an organization is invaluable in today’s world.

 

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