Rocky Mountain Surgical Center digitizes procurement process to improve operational efficiency

Nestled in the picturesque Rocky Mountains in Bozeman, Montana, Rocky Mountain Surgical Center (RMSC) is an ambulatory surgery center (ASC) that specializes in orthopedics, gastroenterology, pain medicine and podiatry procedures.

Before the pandemic, RMSC collaborated with Medline to develop custom surgical packs to fit their diverse needs and to streamline their operating room processes. As the pandemic began to constrain supply chains, RMSC explored ways it could improve their inventory management and procurement processes to ensure they had what they needed to serve their patient’s diverse needs.

“We keep a lean inventory and operate on a just-in-time mentality which helps to keep our ASC operating efficiently,” said Wesley White, purchasing manager at Rocky Mountain Surgical Center. “Typically, I would spend 1.5 hours a day on procurement, and when COVID-19 hit, we began seeing backorders of products. As a result, we spent almost all day every day trying to keep supplies coming in.”

According to a recent article in Becker’s Hospital Review by Joseph Arruda of the Berkeley Research Group, one of the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the health system will be the need for proactive inventory management to support Periodic Automatic Replenishment (PAR) and perpetual inventories.

Like many other ASCs, RMSC’s procurement process was time-intensive and spanned multiple vendors. Managing orders and costs was a manual process dependent on paper invoices and phone calls. In addition, documents needed to be triple matched, signed and turned in.

As a secondary supplier, Medline plays a critical role in providing RMSC with custom surgical packs, drapes and fluids. As the largest privately-owned healthcare company in America, Medline also has partnerships with a diverse range of partners who specialize in helping healthcare run better, including Hybrent, a leader in cloud-based software solutions for managing and automating supply chain, procurement and inventory control processes. By collaborating with Medline and Hybrent, ASC’s like RMSC achieve incredible results, including:

1. Instantaneous order recognition.
2. Ability to track open orders in real-time.
3. Complete digitization of the procurement process.

“Gathering all the information needed was a challenge, but once we pulled the files and entered them into Hybrent, we began to see results while reducing the time I spend on procurement to about 15 minutes per day,” White continued. “Working with Hybrent and Medline to move our ordering process into a secure, digital environment, removed tedious tasks like phoning in orders, and saved us time and money.”

Learn more about how Medline and Hybrent help ASCs to better manage supply chain and procurement processes.