An implant held on consignment belongs to the supplier until it is used, but it sits in the hospital’s rooms and under its responsibility. When the hospital and the supplier count the same stock, they rarely reach the same figure. The cause is seldom anyone’s mistake: usage is recorded in one place, stock is counted in another, and nobody compares them in time.
Why do hospital and supplier figures not match?
Three causes usually coincide, and they coexist:
- Usage is recorded late or incompletely. It is noted when the procedure ends, or days later, and sometimes without the lot number.
- Stock is counted differently. Part of it is in the store, part in the theatre and part in a case that has travelled between departments.
- Returns and exchanges are not closed. A product that goes back to the supplier, or is swapped for another size, is left half-recorded on one side.
What changes when each department keeps its own inventory?
In a hospital with several surgical departments (orthopaedics, cardiology, neurosurgery, ophthalmology), each one usually has its own references, suppliers and way of keeping control. That is reasonable day to day. The problem appears at reconciliation:
- The supplier claims or replenishes on the total, while the hospital only knows what each department tells it.
- The same product may be registered under different names in different departments.
- Nobody sees the whole picture: what is held across the hospital, what is about to expire and what could be moved from one department to another.
What should be possible to reconcile?
For each supplier and each period, four data points:
- What has been used, with its lot number and the procedure in which it was used.
- What stock remains, and where.
- What expires soon, with time to act.
- What has been returned or replaced, and whether the supplier has closed it.
Capturing the unique device identifier (UDI) is, in practice, an act at the point of use: it is there, when the item is taken and used, that the data is recorded reliably.
How is expiry controlled when volumes are uneven?
With surgical volumes that vary from month to month, a wide consignment assortment easily expires in the departments that operate less. Two ideas help:
- See the stock of the whole hospital, not just each department’s, to move material before it expires.
- Review the assortment with usage data: which references are hardly used and could go back to the supplier, and which run out.
What data is needed and where does it come from?
Visibility of stock by location and lot, including consignment stock, adds value on its own. Its full value comes when it is connected, through integration, with the hospital’s systems (ERP, surgical scheduling), with a scope defined in each project. Without that connection, reconciliation is still possible, but more manual.
Three questions to start
- Can you say today, without asking each department for reports, what material from a given supplier is held across the whole hospital?
- Is the lot number of what is used recorded at the moment of use?
- When did your count and the supplier’s last match, and how much effort did it take to reach that agreement?
If the answer to any of them is “no”, there is no need to start with technology. Start by agreeing what is reconciled, how often, and who is responsible for each data point.
How we approach it at Synexia
At Synexia we work on the process first and the tool afterwards. You can read more in our solution Implants and consignment stock and in the articles Consignment implants: who is responsible and A safety alert arrives.