Hospitals Spend Less Time, Save More When Optimizing Medical Supplies with Z5 Inventory

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- After analyzing years' worth of project and customer data, health care supply chain company Z5 Inventory has drastically expanded the capabilities of its software in order to empower health care workers to make informed supply decisions on their own every day.

"The thought of right-sizing inventory became this giant, intimidating monster of a problem," explains Carl Natenstedt, a twenty-year veteran of the health care supply chain and CEO of Z5 Inventory. "We're giving providers the resources to slay that monster while doing what they're already doing."

Supply chain and finance professionals can now use the Z5 Inventory Platform to have full visibility into what is on their health care facilities' shelves, as well as real-time analytics to advise whether that product should be kept, moved, sold or donated.

Taking immediate and continuous steps toward right-sizing inventory will help hospitals address the fact that currently as much as 30% of all medical and surgical supplies are thrown away before they can be used, resulting in an annual $5 billion waste across the industry.

As a featured speaker at the 2021 AHRMM conference, Mr. Natenstedt explained: "One of our partners, Steward Health Care, worked with Z5 Inventory to prevent more than $29 million worth of inventory from expiration and achieve a savings of more than $16 million that was able to be reinvested in the care they provide their communities."

But he was quick to add: "The ability to experience recurring savings by making the Z5 Inventory Platform part of their ongoing inventory optimization efforts will be even more beneficial."

The traditional method of perioperative inventory optimization is dependent on a large-scale project that requires a proportionally large commitment of resources. Waves of teams would travel between provider sites assessing inventory needs, at which point analytics external to the software would provide a roadmap for a secondary set of teams to revisit sites and perform the physical tasks of moving, selling and donating supplies.

While this conventional, project-based approach successfully produces savings for hospital customers, the timeline between conception and the final state of savings often stretches across months.

The newly redesigned Z5 Inventory Platform provides health care providers with:

• Real-time excess identification suggesting savings opportunities.
• Industrywide product database supplementing hospital inventory data.
• Simple barcode scanning (UPC, GTIN, NDC, and more) speeding data capture.
• Elastic search with NLP recognizing exactly what you're trying to look up.
• Expanded functionality enabling a wider variety of inventory tasks (cycle counts, perpetual inventory counts, pharmacy counts, expiration sweeps).

This forward-thinking approach to applying advanced technological solutions to the inefficiencies of health care's supply chain has earned Z5 Inventory features in technical profiles by CIOReview, industry articles in Becker's Hospital Review and business news interviews in Forbes, the Associated Press and Austin American-Statesman.

Any health care provider interested in seeing how the improved Z5 Inventory mobile app and online dashboard could help with their continuous inventory management should sign up for a free trial at Z5Inventory.com/expiration.

About Z5 Inventory:
Z5 Inventory was founded with the purpose of saving health care providers nationwide from expiring product, empowering them to Count product on-hand, Reallocate excess product, and Buy product they actually need at reduced prices. Anyone interested in a preview or trial of digital supply chain management using the Z5 Inventory Platform should visit www.Z5Inventory.com/Contact.

Media Contact:
Shane Pratt
512-215-9473
[email protected]

SOURCE Z5 Inventory

Related Links

https://www.z5inventory.com/