Like other businesses in the healthcare space right now, we are inspired by the efforts of front-line responders and driven to provide any relief we can. That’s why, after conversations with our team and our network of healthcare professionals (HCPs), we have decided to offer hospitals free access to our medical inventory management software for at least the next 6 months in response to COVID-19.

Through many conversations with hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers over the last several years, we’ve realized just how challenging healthcare inventory management can be for clinical teams. It’s often a very manual, error-prone process requiring staff to dig through siloed data to track down the supplies they need.

Now, with an unprecedented push to deploy high-demand hospital inventory in response to COVID-19, critical supplies like personal protective equipment (PPE) are dwindling – while other high-value, high-priority items end up lost or misplaced in the shuffle. Part of the problem, from our perspective, is the complexity and inefficiency of the current supply chain. It’s not just that providers don’t have the supplies they need; it’s that they’re not always sure what’s available or where it’s located.

In the wake of COVID-19, this need for visibility across the entire value chain is more acute than ever. Overburdened HCPs and hospital admins need an easier, more efficient way to manage inventory so they can track PPE, medical devices and other critical supplies in real-time, with push-button simplicity.

The ability to quickly identify assets is crucial right now. You need to know what you have and where it is, so you can use it. That’s exactly what the ConnectSx platform was designed to do, and that’s why we’re offering hospitals free access for at least the next 6 months to help them manage critical inventory in the wake of COVID-19.

The Benefits of Supply Chain Visibility

With HCPs working overtime and shifting roles to focus on priority cases, hospitals are struggling to manage the supply chain and locate life-saving assets that the frontline staff needs. With all hands on deck addressing COVID-19, there’s no time to waste on manual inventory cycle counts, tedious paperwork, or countless emails and phone calls.

Using secure web- and mobile-based tools to streamline these time-consuming tasks, ConnectSx can reduce the burden of hospital inventory management – offering clinical teams some relief during this pandemic response.

This will help hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers:

  • Find and acquire critical supplies. During this unprecedented spike in healthcare demand, there’s tremendous value in simply knowing what you have and where it is, so you can instantly locate and access the critical inventory that clinical teams need to treat patients. With the ability to share information across a network of organizations, hospitals can increase their access to much needed supplies through collaboration with partner facilities and systems.
  • Minimize administrative overhead. The right inventory management software can save significant time compared to manual methods. Our platform was designed – and continues to be updated – based on real user feedback, so it simplifies existing workflows without steep learning curves, making implementation as fast and frictionless as possible.
  • Share knowledge remotely. Significant restrictions on who and how many non-essential workers are allowed into hospitals may limit the role of sales reps, who typically bear a significant share of asset management responsibility. In response, we’re accelerating our platform’s capabilities for delivering knowledge and remote access to inventory information.
  • Prevent errors and omissions. Operating under peak levels of stress, manual processes are even more error-prone than usual. Missed and under-billed assets can have a catastrophic impact on operations, and that directly affects the ability to deliver care. By digitizing the transactions, we can help simplify the billing workflow and mitigate errors and omissions that lead to lost revenue.
  • Improve the quality of care. By freeing up clinical staff to focus on patients instead of paperwork, these tools have the potential to improve the delivery of care over the long-term by reducing hospital inventory waste, costs and inefficiencies.

Preparing for a New Future

We believe that our toolset can help make life a little easier for overburdened HCPs during this crisis – at least alleviating the challenge of inventory management so they can focus on all the other pressing issues facing them right now. Their top priority is patient care, and our top priority is to support that outcome by simplifying their supply chain.

Our primary driver for offering free access to hospitals is our belief that cost and budget constraints should not be what drives the decision-making process during times of crisis – especially when it comes to implementing tools that help support critical healthcare operations. Although we’re initially extending this offer for the next 6 months, the flexibility of this timeframe will be driven by the state of the recovery rather than a fixed period of time.

As long as HCPs are rushing to the frontlines, we’ll work tirelessly to support them. We’re pushing new features and improvements to our platform every few weeks, based on the feedback we’re hearing from the medical field. Our latest release included a major upgrade to our architecture, designed to enable development of additional features over the next six months, including:

  • Advanced reporting and analytics
  • Improved inventory cycle counting
  • Enhanced remote knowledge delivery and remote field support
  • HIPAA-compliant video conferencing

As healthcare continues to evolve, we will remain as committed as ever to streamlining the supply chain so hospitals can take control of their inventory and deliver timely quality care.

If your hospital needs a more efficient way to manage critical medical inventory, please contact us to discuss how ConnectSx might be able to help.