Reduce Stockouts in Hospitals to Near Zero with One Network’s Supply Chain Business Network Technology

Platform enhancements bring greater efficiency and accuracy to patient-driven supply chain management

Dallas TX, Oct 31, 2019 — One Network Enterprises, a global provider of multi-party business networks for autonomous supply chain management, today announced the availability of the latest version of its platform for the Healthcare industry. One Network’s Real-Time Value Network of more than 75,000 companies, powered by the NEO platform, brings unprecedented resilience, efficiency, and shared business benefits to hospitals, global procurement organizations (GPOs), distributors, pharmaceutical and medical supply companies, and logistics providers.

One Network’s new release unifies complex supply chains for increased transparency and collaboration, which is especially important in Healthcare supply networks, given the numerous sites involved in nationwide and regional systems. For example, in Nigeria alone, One Network and its partners connect 18,000 hospitals, clinics, and health facilities, automating supply chain operations to serve a population of 200 million. In North America and Europe, One Network’s customers include some the largest GPOs, medical device and pharmaceutical firms.

“Ensuring authentic medicines and supplies reach hospitals in a timely manner and in the right amounts is essential to success in the Healthcare business. More importantly, failure to pay attention to this area can have a devastating effect on patients,” said Joe Bellini, COO at One Network Enterprises. “Our platform addresses these challenges head-on and demonstrates how GPOs and hospital networks can leverage real-time data, serialization, and intelligent agents to dramatically lower costs, reduce stockouts, and secure the supply chain to better serve patients.”

Leveraging the platform, healthcare industry suppliers and transportation providers can be onboarded to the Network once and connected to a rich ecosystem of trading partners. The latest release of the network-based, patient-driven system, further enhances the ability of trading partners to collaborate in real time, and to optimize around treating the patient with the greatest efficiency and accuracy. This lowers costs, removes unnecessary inventory from the network, and improves patient care.

In the U.S., nurses and hospital staff typically spend more than six percent of their time per week managing inventory and tracking supplies. Frontline clinicians spend five hours a week on supply chain tasks, including manual counting, searching for supplies, re-ordering products, and dealing with supply-related documentation. With One Network, hospital staff and their network of partners can automate routine tasks, focus on critical ones and handle only the exceptions that arise in supply chain operations. Benefits include:

• Reduce hospital inventory stockouts to near zero
• Improve service levels and reduce customer complaints
• Reduce network-wide inventory by 10 to 30 percent, eliminate overstocked items, and lower safety stock levels
• Improve logistics utilization by 2 to 5 percent, lower replenishment costs, and reduce expedited items
• Improve nurse and supply managers’ productivity, and eliminate supply-chain related overtime
• Automate hospital and suppliers’ supply chain processes
• Automate and coordinate home care delivery services
• Enable reverse logistics and improve sustainability

The result is better care for patients, lower burden on hospital and healthcare staff, and reduced costs for the entire network. Additional enhancements for the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical industries include:

Serialization & Chain of Custody tracking to support Targeted Recall Management and Dispute Management that is consistent with Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) requirements. Includes enhanced workflows for managing product ownership across the supply chain, which mitigates the problem of counterfeit drugs in parts of Africa and elsewhere. The Dispute Management feature allows the recording and management of disputes for any and all parts of a shipment. Serialization capabilities are aligned to international standards that enable tracing pharmaceutical products through the entire chain of custody for full visibility and fast, targeted recalls.  

Patient demand and supply visibility across the value chain, enabled by NEO intelligent agents, automates and optimizes healthcare supply networks. Intelligent demand sensing across the healthcare network drives efficiency in optimizing timely access to supplies where needed, with the ability to continuously optimize inventory by department. One Network automates and optimizes procurement, deliveries, and replenishment based on hospital department usage patterns, patient schedules, and predicted patient demand.

Prediction and mitigation of supply disruptions enables intelligent agents and human managers to intervene early, resolve issues and mitigate the impact of supply disruptions at any tier in the network. NEO makes recommendations based on similar events from across the network, and optionally executes solutions for all involved parties.