Oracle helps healthcare organisations manage inventory

  • October 29, 2024
  • Steve Rogerson

At this week’s Oracle Health Summit in Nashville, the software giant announced supply chain capabilities within the Fusion Cloud applications suite to help healthcare organisations optimise inventory management and improve patient care.

The latest updates should let organisations increase productivity, expand insights and enhance buying decisions by automating inventory management, increasing inventory visibility and improving procurement data quality.

“Managing healthcare inventory is a key factor in helping to ensure clinicians have the right supplies for each procedure, but a lot of the critical tasks they perform rely on disconnected manual processes, which can lead to delays, shortages and slower response times,” said Chris Leone, executive vice president at Oracle. “These new supply chain capabilities enable inventory managers, buyers and contract managers to address these challenges by automating stock replenishment, providing a complete view of inventory, and delivering a more expansive product catalogue. This will help healthcare organisations minimise sourcing errors, optimise inventory, reduce critical recall response times, and improve patient care and safety.”

The latest healthcare-specific supply chain updates within Fusion include:

  • Inventory shortages workbench: Helps organisations quickly identify and fix inventory shortages or stockouts. The workbench provides a single view of inventory and lets users easily assess critical item shortages and identify the cause, review options for addressing item shortages, and take action to reduce stockouts.
  • Mobile recall management: Helps organisations respond quickly, accurately and comprehensively to product recall notices. This responsive mobile application lets users quickly scan items and locations, record recall counts, and take immediate action to quarantine affected items, improve patient safety and reduce risk.
  • RFID for replenishment: Enables organisations to increase productivity and prevent delays by helping ensure the right amount of stock is in the right location at the right time. The feature leverages technologies from Avery Dennison, Terso and Zebra Technologies to automate inventory management by automatically capturing usage, updating stock balances, tracking location, and triggering restocking of supplies and materials.
  • Symmetric health partnership: Helps organisations increase productivity in sourcing and reduce product order errors. This expansive third-party medical, surgical, and device product catalogue from Symmetric Health (www.symmetrichealthsolutions.com) enables users to discover, source and price desired items that are not listed within their organisation’s existing item master, frequently purchased items or contract portfolio. The fully attributed and enriched data help reduce manual data maintenance and improve analytics.

Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (oracle.com/scm) helps healthcare organisations seamlessly connect supply chain and clinical processes to respond to changing demand and supply conditions to deliver the best patient care.

The Oracle Health Summit (www.oracle.com/health/health-summit) in Nashville runs from October 28 to 30 and brings together global healthcare leaders to discuss how to tackle industrywide problems and apply innovations.