MetroHealth Harmonizes Surgical Workflows With ReadySet Full-Suite

Customer Profile: The MetroHealth System

Number of Hospitals/ASCs: 1 Level I Trauma Center and 3 ASCs
Number of Bill-Only Charge Sheets per Year: 4,518
Total Bill-Only Spend: $25M per year

MetroHealth’s Challenges

As one of the top Level I trauma centers in the United States, MetroHealth operates under intense pressure to deliver safe and timely surgical care around the clock. MetroHealth’s surgical service lines require industry-leading operational efficiencies in order to deliver exceptional patient care because traumas can occur at any time – necessitating surgical care without prior planning.

MetroHealth faced several common challenges in its surgical supply chain.  Surgical loaner tray management was a persistent issue. With trauma volumes unpredictable by nature, case notifications to vendors frequently occurred with less than 24 hours’ lead time. 8 to 12 vendor trays per case were often delivered to sterile processing and sterilized on short notice when only three or four need be used in the case.  This created backbreaking pressure on sterile processing teams, which were forced to rapidly sterilize trauma trays, many of which were not actually required for the case, while continuing to support regularly scheduled procedures. “Late” tray deliveries (under 48 hours pre-case) and missing instrument sets further complicated an already high-risk environment, raising the possibility of case delays – for cases where surgery can’t wait.

In addition to the sterile processing department, MetroHealth’s supply chain team faced many challenges of its own after the case. Like many hospitals, MetroHealth’s bill-only workflows relied entirely on the manual, paper-based reconciliation of charge sheets, also known as “sticker sheets.” Surgical implants were frequently used off-contract without properly reconciling pricing against supplier agreements and usage against what was charted in the patient’s electronic health record (EHR). The charge sheet reconciliation process depended on staff manually comparing vendor invoices, implant logs, and patient records, and clinical teams bore much of the administrative burden of this work, diverting several hours each day from patient care. This process was slow, error-prone, and frequently resulted in duplicate charges, pricing errors, and utilization discrepancies, leading to millions of dollars in unnecessary spend each year. For a system charged with delivering care under the most urgent and high-acuity circumstances, the inefficiencies of the existing processes were no longer sustainable.

MetroHealth’s surgical supply chain challenges were not unique, but because of MetroHealth’s patient pool, supply chain managers and sterile processing staff operated under razor-thin margins for error. Sterile processing and supply chain leaders realized that an automated solution was needed to better uphold the health system’s commitment to its patients.

Partnering with ReadySet brought structure and predictability into an environment where unpredictability is the norm. Their platform standardized our loaner tray and bill-only workflows, easing pressure on staff and giving us confidence in every case and every bill sheet. What sets ReadySet apart is their ability to partner with our vendors at a strategic level, creating alignment that strengthens relationships and drives better outcomes for the hospital as a whole. – Carol Martz, VP of Supply Chain @ MetroHealth

The ReadySet Solution

To address the inefficiencies in both loaner tray management and bill-only implant workflows, The MetroHealth System partnered with ReadySet Surgical to implement its full suite of surgical supply chain solutions system-wide.

ReadySet’s platform provided MetroHealth with a centralized, cloud-based workflow for managing surgical loaner trays from vendor notification through return. Vendor notification was automated within the ReadySet platform based on the surgical schedule several weeks in advance of the case. ReadySet’s direct integrations with MetroHealth’ top medical device vendors’ inventory systems enabled the seamless transfer of patient biometric data to the OEMs, allowing vendor reps to optimize tray volumes on an as-needed basis. Inside the SPD, the ReadySet kiosk, featuring an integrated scale and camera, enforced the capture of tray weights and images at both check-in and check-out time to comply with HSPA best practices. Vendors that did not capture images at tray check-out time forfeited the ability to make lost or broken instrument claims.

ReadySet’s bill-only module digitized and standardized MetroHealth’s paper charge sheets, tying vendors to the case ID and bill sheet. Vendors submitted inventory usage directly into the platform, and complete submissions were matched against the implant log, patient record, and contracts repository. Requisition creation and the delivery of POs to vendors was automated within MetroHealth’s Lawson ERP system.

ReadySet’s Results

ReadySet’s full-suite solution was implemented across The MetroHealth System.

In 90 days after go-live:

ReadySet Loaner Tray Management achieved:

• Number of Cases: 1,647
• Average Tray Delivery Lead Time: 1.91 days
• Trays Per Case: 2.7 trays

ReadySet Bill-Only achieved:

• Total Bill-Only Spend: $5.46M
• Identified Non-Contract Spend: $794,930
• Identified Pricing Errors: $177,780
• Identified Utilization Errors: $1.39M

Estimated Labor Savings: 1,003 hours

How can we improve the surgical supply chain at your facility? Book a demo with us to explore the ReadySet solution!