Organization Tips for Hospital Inventory

If you are in charge of managing a hospital, there is a good chance that you are going to want to make sure that you never run out of supplies. Running out of supplies could result in you not being able to provide adequate care to patients within the necessary time frame. Here are some organization tips to ensure that your hospital inventory is under control at all times, allowing you to constantly be ordering the items that you need well before you run out of stock.

1. Invest in a Scan System for Larger Items

It is not going to be in your best interest to use a scanning system to scan the bar code of each and every pen that leaves a particular drawer because pens are not worth that much money and are relatively cheap to order. However, it is going to be a good idea for you to implement a bar code scanning system that allows you to keep track of larger, more expensive supplies and reorder when needed. This will allow you to automate the ordering of supplies so that when the number available drops below a certain level, the system can simply order more without you even having to think about it. This will increase your productivity because you won't have to worry about these basic tasks.

2. Use a Weight-Based Inventory System for Smaller Items

The next thing that you will need to do is implement a weight-based inventory system for smaller items. Keep all of your smaller items in one or two central locations in your hospital and build time into each department's schedule to retrieve the items they need each day or week. This will allow you to easily implement a weight-based inventory system. You know how much each individual item weighs. This means that you can have each basket of each item on a scale that will send an alert to your inventory management software whenever the weight drops below a threshold, indicating that you are running out of that particular item. Again, the inventory management system can automatically order more of each particular item that is running low. You can also use this system to alert you to check whether or not there is more of an item stored elsewhere and then only have orders go out if there is not more in the back.

For more information, talk to a company like Instant Inventory Service.


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