How To Manage Your Practice's Medical Supplies
Posted on: 4 November 2021
All practices need medical supplies to handle their work. If you wish to run an efficient and effective practice, though, you need to think about how you'll manage them. Here are four tips to ensure you'll have the right medical supplies when you need them.
Standardization
Every procedure you handle at your office should have an accompanying kit. This kit needs to be standardized so you can keep tabs on it. Likewise, the standardized kit needs to correspond to the medical supplies you have in storage. You want to be able to check the kit before any procedure and pull the supplies in advance.
Avoid non-standard items. Follow prices and inventories from suppliers when you're arranging your inventory. When you can substitute materials or drugs with the knowledge the substitutes will be in stock more often, consider it.
If you have to use two different items that can substitute, create charts explaining the substitutions. Place them next to the inventories so employees can't avoid them, too. This will ensure if you bring in a new person they can follow the system and understand the logic.
Marking
Do a little math and figure out what the critical limit for each of your medical supplies is. Place a physical mark in the storage unit indicating when you've hit this limit. This will ensure as you pull stuff from inventory that employees know to place orders in time. Include some calculated overhead so you'll place your orders before you hit that critical limit. You may also want to use a scanning system so you can track your physical counts against computerized inventory numbers.
Track Orders
Never depend on a supplier's tracking system to keep tabs on your incoming medical supplies. Set up a board with stages of shipments where everybody can see them. When you place an order, put a card for that item at the appropriate stage. Move the card once it ships, and move it again when it arrives. Finally, move the card to a slot indicating when the items are restocked.
Control Storage Conditions
Know which products need to stay under what conditions. Maintain strict separation between items based on their storage requirements. This will prevent heat from control systems, such as refrigerators, from potentially affecting other medical supplies.
Ventilation, temperature and humidity controls, and air filtration are all critical, too. Whatever the required conditions for a product, you want it to be in a space where the climate never wobbles close to or past the manufacturer's recommendations.
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