Driving Out Costs and have taken steps to automate processes , improve data quality and increase access to information on which to base business decisions , others are still plagued by inefficient manual processes , inaccurate data , lack of visibility and poor business intelligence and reporting .
Key challenges to transformative change in the healthcare supply chain include :
Number of industry players : Unlike other industries in which there are just a few big players , in the U . S . alone there are nearly 5,300 acute-care hospitals , each of which has hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of vendors .
Vast amounts of ever-changing data : The healthcare supply chain must deal with a tremendous amount of data , such as contract information , that changes frequently . Every year , on average , changes are made to one-third of the 30 million plus medical-surgical products on the market in the U . S ., and each GPO is estimated to make as many as 30,000 changes to contract data each month .
Disparate IT systems and lack of data standards : Disparate IT systems that don ’ t share infor mation , and the difficulty of incorporating global data standards for unique organization , location and product identification into procurement processes , add to the complexity .
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