Summative Assessment- Supply Chain Management

Summative Assessment- Supply Chain Management

Economics in the Market

CIOX’s top-range medical data records unlock multiple uses for health data. Among others, the records provide healthcare insights that are life savers for many patients. The company’s primary goal is to unlock the full potential of health data. In addition, CIOX also seeks to facilitate access to health data, modernize task performance, and improve nationwide information flow. These services form the basis of CIOX’s supply chain network. Essentially, the company connects medical services providers and decision-makers with hidden data and insights from patients’ health records.

The economics of CIOX’s health information market are cost, access, and quality aspects. These economic trends greatly influence CIOX’s supply chain. As mentioned earlier, CIOX’s supply chain includes elements such as ensuring effective access to health data, modernizing clinical tasks, and enhancing information flow (CIOX, 2018). Firstly, while the company seeks to ensure patients access as much information as possible, it also wants to ensure that the records cover as many patients as possible nationwide. Modernizing operations also calls for ensuring it does not come at a higher cost (CIOX, 2018). Finally, to enhance information flow, the company wants to ensure that such information is as accurate as possible to avoid medical errors.

Expenses of the Organization

According to Fryan et al. (2021), the cost of medical records shifted significantly following a ruling by the District Court of Columbia in 2020. Shortly after the court ruling, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and health records were needed more than ever during the pandemic. Following the court ruling, patient rates reduced significantly. The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) and the Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) state in their specific websites that the initial patient rate is attributable to earlier guidelines that did not limit healthcare providers on how much they could provide.

The ruling by the District Court of Columbia affected two aspects of the cost structure of the earlier medical records. Firstly, patients were allowed to access patient records in multiple formats beyond electronic formats (Fryan et al., 2021). Besides, third-party healthcare stakeholders, including health insurance companies, would now access these records. Most importantly, the ruling scrapped all patient rates on medical data requests. Instead, only healthcare providers would be required to pay for health data. These changes were influenced by the health market economic trends- access and affordability (cost).

Quality

Logan et al. (2001) aver that the pursuit of quality also affects how medical records companies interact with their supply chains. The ultimate determinant of whether a record has sufficient quality is whether it fulfills its intended purpose. For instance, if a patient on drug overdose is taken into the emergency section, physicians will need to establish whether the patient is allergic to some medicines before beginning the treatment process. Medical records will be needed more, especially if such a patient is not accompanied by a family member or someone who has knowledge about their medical history.

Notably, quality is subjective and varies from patient to patient. Also, quality is based on patient-physician interaction. For this reason, most healthcare facilities like videotaping their interactions and later evaluating the records to determine patient satisfaction (Logan et al., 2001). These videos provide critical insights, which are later used to measure the quality of healthcare.

The State of Supply Chain Management and Operations

CIOX leverages partnerships with sister health data companies to reduce the cost of data acquisition. One of the successful partnerships that have greatly improved the delivery of healthcare records is the one with Diameter Health. Through the partnership, CIOX uses Diameter’s in-class infusion engine to acquire data. The partnership resulted from the fact that records are diverse, fragmented across different organizations, and sometimes not comprehensive enough. Gathering such data and processing it to obtain actionable insights is quite expensive. Diameter Health’s infusion technology comes in handy since it facilitates the accumulation of such data to produce the desired outcomes.

The partnership has helped reduce CIOX Company’s data acquisition costs. Notably, that is because the company does not have to purchase it from different vendors, as that would come at a higher cost. In addition, Diameter’s advanced technological capabilities ensure that the company hosts comprehensive data in a single platform. To that end, the company does not require much money to update and host the health data pages.

Further, CIOX offers tools that harmonize data with the ultimate goal of ensuring that it supplements clinical data. Using the company’s data tools, healthcare providers acquire more insights without the need to conduct further references. Besides, the sources are so enriched in such a way that they will enrich the company’s traditional analytics. Essentially, the company has engaged extra tools that prevent the company from seeking additional analytical insights, reducing the ultimate cost of data.

Current Supply Chain Management Structure and Recommendations

To attain optimum supply chain outcomes, CIOX centralized its information management system. A centralized information management system ensures that the company processes data from one location, thus making it easy to detect and eradicate errors (Oluwabusayo Omotayo et al., 2021). Also, centralizing information management systems has gone a long way to ensure that they reduce the staff needed to manage data. With reduced staff needs, the company manages data at a lower cost. Another strategy implementation that has improved CIOX’s supply chain outcomes is the introduction of robotics in data management. Such robots are effective in ensuring insightful data processing and allow the extra staff who would have performed the robotic duties to engage in more crucial tasks.

Recommendations

To enhance supply chain operations, CIOX needs to mine more patient data. To that end, the need for patient identifiers cannot be overstated. Patient identifiers include a patient’s name, home address, emergency contact, next of kin, date of birth, phone numbers, and any other personal information that may be deemed necessary (Ehrenstein et al., 2019). The identifiers are later compared against another batch of identifiers maintained by a health facility. The goal is to ensure that a patient is accurately identified and that they are well-catered for in cases of emergencies. The move goes a long way to ensure quality healthcare delivery, being one of the key economic factors in the healthcare industry.

Ehrenstein et al. (2019) state that enhancing the quality of the demographic information included in the health records will enhance healthcare delivery. Currently, only basic demographic information such as gender, ethnicity/race are included. However, the demographics ignore other equally important information such as educational background and nationality. Therefore, there is a need to include such demographics since they offer critical health insights that will improve treatment outcomes.

Opportunities for Organization Co-Branding

As healthcare interests expand globally, the need for companies to venture into global markets is also becoming necessary. However, venturing into these markets alone may not bring the desired results. There is a need for organizations in the healthcare sector to co-brand and collaborate to deliver market value. One of the opportunities for co-branding available for a medical records company like CIOX is to partner with local health facilities. Once the company co-brands with some of the most popular brands, it will gain traction and penetrate a new market.

Conclusion

In summary, effective supply chain management is crucial to delivering positive healthcare outcomes in the healthcare industry. To ensure that supply chains are managed effectively, there is a need to consider the three economic trends in the healthcare sector -cost, access, and quality. Consequently, healthcare facilities implement supply chain management policies that support the three economic considerations in the sector. The analysis above identifies key strategies to be implemented by a health records company, CIOX, to deliver its services effectively. One such effort towards attaining effective delivery while sustaining industry economics is to centralize information such that the company can deliver high-quality data. Another impact of economic trends on CIOX’s supply chain is that the company has had to move with speed to cut costs. The patient charges that existed in the traditional model no longer exist. In addition, leveraging partners like Diameter Health has helped CIOX gather comprehensive data, such that there is no need to purchase data from multiple vendors. Finally, to improve the quality of health data provided, the company is encouraged to improve its identifiers and demographics that form part of patient data.

References

CIOX. (2018). Connecting The Healthcare Ecosystem With The Data And Insights In Medical Records To Improve Patient Outcomes. Ciox. https://www.cioxhealth.com/

Ehrenstein, V., Kharrazi, H., Lehmann, H., & Taylor, C. O. (2019). Obtaining Data from Electronic Health Records. In www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK551878/

Fryan, L. F., Esq., Thorn, N., Esq., & CHC. (2021, October). How the Ciox case changed medical record requests. Compliancecosmos.org. https://compliancecosmos.org/how-ciox-case-changed-medical-record-requests#:~:text=The%20Ciox%20ruling&text=The%20impact%20of%20this%20ruling

Logan, J. R., Gorman, P. N., & Middleton, B. (2001). Measuring the quality of medical records: a method for comparing completeness and correctness of clinical encounter data. In Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium (p. 408). American Medical Informatics Association.

Oluwabusayo Omotayo, P., Oladimeji Olasupo, J., & Benjamin Alegbeleye, T. (2021). Centralized Electronic Health Records System: A Step towards an Optimized Health Care Delivery System Ahead of Possible Future Outbreaks. International Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 10(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijiis.20211001.11

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In the final week of the course, you synthesize the knowledge of healthcare costs, revenue, and expenses, along with the underlying economic drivers of these considerations to evaluate ways to improve the quality of care and to lower costs for patients. You also integrate considerations in supply chain management that can impact your brand and, in turn, affect demand for your services, whether positively or negatively.

Summative Assessment- Supply Chain Management

Write a 1,225- to 1,550-word report on your organization’s supply chain management and how it impacts your organization’s brand. Include the following points:

Based on the assignment in Week 2, analyze how the economics in your market impact your organization’s management of its supply chain.
Based on the assignment in Week 4, analyze if the expenses in your organization are impacted positively or negatively by how the supply chain is managed.

Summarize the state of supply chain management and operations at your organization. Make any recommendations based on supply chain best practices to enhance its performance within the context of the health care sector.

Many suppliers and their customers co-brand now (think of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s). Are there opportunities for your organization to co-brand with any of its supply chain partners? If so, what are the advantages?

Cite any references to support your assignment.