Vizient Newsroom

While 2021 ended with uncertainty around the future of the Biden Administration’s Build Back Better Act and the return to any sense of normal, we entered 2022 with the start of hospitals’ and other health care providers’ required compliance with surprise billing regulations. Because we know Vizient members and providers throughout the country have been overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, here’s what you need to know. 

The percentage of Americans aged 65 or older will surpass 80 million by 2040 and will hit 94.7 million by 2060, brining brings with it an enormous burden of chronic illness, shouldered by a group of people who are increasingly disabled, socially isolated and severely limited in their ability to cope with their illnesses and the complexity of the health care system. At the same time, we have an unprecedented increase in the number of healthy seniors—folks whose professional careers are coming to a close, but whose physical and mental capabilities are far from exhausted. With their working lives winding down, many of these healthy seniors express feelings of diminished usefulness. It’s this fortuitous confluence of relatively healthy seniors and their less fortunate generational peers that make the echoes of volunteerism that John F. Kennedy spoke of in 1961 relevant today.

As hospitals and health systems continue to work to manage costs while maintaining quality, surgical tray standardization remains an untapped resource for many organizations. As surgeons request instruments based on their individual preferences, the size of surgical trays continues to grow. And as the number of instruments on a surgical tray grows, the use of those instruments declines, creating unnecessary costs to purchase, process and manage the instruments. Standardizing surgical trays can support hospital efforts to manage costs and maintain quality, but for many are an untapped resource. Here’s what you need to know.

Today more than ever managing change is an inherent part of a supply chain leader’s role. Backorders, substitutions and supplier changes have become almost daily events. While some of these changes may be transparent to end-users, such as changing an office supply, others, such as a critical patient care item, may involve shifting processes and procedures that affect multiple departments across the hospital. In my experience, the latter requires clear communication to all affected groups and end-users to successfully implement wide-reaching supply chain changes.