By Ashlea Souffrou

In the United States, 8 percent of all disposables go expired on hospital shelves annually. Likewise, we’ve found about 17 percent of items in hospital supply rooms have not been used in 12 months. Perhaps most alarmingly, between .5 and 1 percent of items currently in hospital supply rooms have been recalled. That means there is a very good reason why they should not be used in a procedure—and many of these items are implants.

Overall, U.S. hospitals have an annual medical device surplus that runs into the billions annually. This represents a lot of waste in a system where hospitals are declaring bankruptcy left and right.
Waste in healthcare doesn’t just mean that unused supplies end up in landfills. It means that financial resources and time is wasted as well. Hospitals miss out on the opportunity to provide better care for patients by acquiring new technology or hiring more nurses.

Overall, U.S. hospital inventories are in really bad shape—and many hospitals are unaware of the extent of the problem.

Where current inventory management falls short
Many hospitals have advanced inventory management systems. These are very expensive, complex systems for entering and removing devices and instruments into a digital system. Theoretically, with an inventory management system, the hospital knows what’s on its shelves in the supply rooms. However, there’s a lot of information that is NOT included in an inventory management system, and these are details that matter—details like expiration dates and lot numbers.

At the same time, things move fast in a modern hospital, and reality doesn’t always match up with what an inventory management system claims. There is always a difference between what a hospital has on its shelves and what it thinks it has on its shelves. As a result, almost all hospitals do manual counts in supply rooms every month or every quarter. In fact, 83 percent of frontline clinicians and hospital leaders still rely on manual inventory management.

This is enormously time consuming—and usually not accurate. Important time is wasted when a nurse spends two days writing down product numbers instead of caring for a patient.

And regardless, devices are still expiring on the shelves, recalled products aren’t being removed, and PAR levels are driving excessive numbers of unused devices.

Beyond inventory management to inventory control
There is technology available to make the inventory process faster and ensure hospital inventories are safer and more complete. Since 2017, all manufacturers have been required to use standardized barcodes—a unique device identifier, or simply UDI. The UDI code contains all the information needed to avoid the risk and waste of current inventory controls.

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