New HIMSS maturity model helps align supply chain strategies

The Clinically Integrated Supply Outcomes Model, or CISOM, enables better automation of data capture, helping health systems understand which products and processes offer better outcomes and lower costs.

HIMSS Analytics this week launched its newest maturity model, meant to help provider organizations benchmark their progress as they innovate their clinical and operational supply chains: the Clinically Integrated Supply Outcomes Model, or CISOM.

WHY IT MATTERS
The new model provides aims to give provider organizations a guide toward improving their supply chain infrastructure to boost quality, safety and efficacy.

CISOM can help hospitals track and trace their care processes – identifying areas of waste, and reducing instances of medical errors. By offering a guide to automating supply chain infrastructure at the point of care, it prevent adverse events by communicating global standards related to products, patients and geography.

It also helps with optimization of inventory (helping spot opportunities for cost saving), traceability of clinical decision support tools and other insights into risk management and care innovation.

Like HIMSS' other maturity models, CISOM has eight stages, 0-7, moving toward the goal of automated inventory management:

• Stage 7: Clinically integrated supply chain achieved enabling precision and personalized healthcare, traceability of care processes, and products used in care linked to patient outcomes to identify the conditions by which best outcomes are achieved for unique population segments
• Stage 6: Transparency across patient journey of care supports automated traceability of patient care processes and products used in care; provider teams all linked to individual patient outcomes
• Stage 5: Supply chain processes are automated and integrated at the point of care to enable complete traceability of products, care processes, and automated tracking of adverse events and product recalls
• Stage 4: Integration of supply chain processes into clinical programs support optimization of inventory management linked to patient care needs
• Stage 3: Supply chain strategy creates visibility of inventory across the organization, automates financial processes and informs product standardization
• Stage 2: Inventory tracking and automation focus on optimization of supply costs and inventory management
• Stage 1: Basic supply chain processes are established as a business function for the organization
• Stage 0: Inventory and supply processes are manual; there is no supply chain strategy identified for the organization

THE LARGER TREND
HIMSS notes that medical error is the third leading cause of death in North America, and points to research that shows how health systems gained value from clinically integrated supply chain infrastructure.

One U.S. health system in the United States was able find $1 billion in new savings as a direct outcome of optimizing and transforming supply chain processes – such as a 29.5 percent decline in labor costs and 33 percent decline in supply costs. One in the United Kingdom, meanwhile, is expected to save £1,034,000,000 by year seven of its work through CISOM, according to HIMSS.

ON THE RECORD
"Despite many well-funded initiatives to strengthen quality and safety, healthcare systems worldwide have not experienced significant improvement in these core areas," according to HIMSS. "Medical device failures and lack of traceability of products within the health systems are significant factors that contribute to this issue. 

"Additionally, the drive toward precision medicine is putting significant pressure on healthcare providers to find value at a system level to achieve sustainability," they add. "Quality and safety should be at the core of healthcare systems and many of the issues can be highly preventable, such as increasing the ability to trace, and find, products used in healthcare. Providers need a prescriptive roadmap to follow and measure against to support system improvement and personalized care."