Large ASC Management Organizations: Why Velocity, why the Trakker....

Imagine shopping at the grocery store and scanning all your items with your phone to purchase them, as you shop. Consider the significant financial savings retailers could achieve by eliminating cash registers and the associated personnel and staff at the front of the store. This technologically feasible model requires only an app download on your phone. However, it has not been adopted and will never be.

The primary reason for this is the necessity of workflow and transactional process control.

The Operating Room exhibits similarities to retail markets. Consigned items are consumed and documented asynchronously with the business transaction of paying for them. Sales representatives from device companies are often tasked with documenting usage, subsequently closing the business cycle with their ASC customers at a later time and location. The key distinction lies in the fact that instead of a five-dollar bag of chips, the items cost hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars.

Just-in-time inventory has posed significant business challenges for ASCs. Having been involved with ASCs for over two decades, the most persistent issues related to efficient business operation and management are inaccurate, time-delayed case costing, and incomplete and error-prone documentation of implants and supplies used during surgery.

The root cause of these problems lies in distributed and often discreet documentation tasks assigned by necessity to device representatives and the lack of price control and cost rigor due to price discovery and business cycle closure post-surgically by ASC purchasing personnel who are not privy to the details of what was consumed. The unfortunate reality is that the sellers (device companies and representatives) are entrusted with complete responsibility and dictate terms to the buyers (ASCs/Providers).

Common sense dictates that this arrangement is inherently flawed.

Retail resolved these challenges through the implementation of point-of-sale scanning at registers. This single point of process control provides buyers with visibility into cost while ensuring the seller’s confidence in documentation accuracy, thereby verifying that the items purchased by consumers are paid for.

Velocity Trakker offers comparable benefits to ASCs. The Trakker serves as a single point of process control, automating all implant and supply documentation at the point of use in the operating room. It captures usage and cost data for all plates, screws, sterile packaged items, and pref-card items, eliminating the manual documentation requirement for nurses in the room. The Trakker and Velocity facilitate complete real-time data distribution throughout the supply chain.

Distributed documentation conducted by device reps (apps on mobile devices) creates an unbalanced and challenging process control environment for ASC operational management, fostering a system of misaligned incentives and control. This system has plagued ASCs and providers for decades.

Process control, price fidelity, and customer value awareness are fundamental principles for any successful retail business. Velocity now empowers ASC management with these principles. Its time for ASCs to  “Put Scan in The Plan” with Summate Velocity.