How to Overcome Medical Supply Ordering Obstacles

Your clinic or medical practice relies on medical supplies to continue treating your patients. Without those supplies, many of your patients will go without the care they expect.

However, keeping supplies ordered and stocked isn’t an easy task. Especially when you have a medical practice to run. Vendors help you keep everything together, assuming they’re delivering supplies properly. Vendor management comes with different obstacles depending on the size of the clinic. However, there are some common obstacles to ordering supplies and working with vendors that all clinics face.

Getting Vendor Documentation

When you work with your medical supply vendors, sometimes they don’t give you documentation for what you ordered. Without any documents, you can’t put what you received into your supply database. Therefore, you won’t know when you’re out of supplies, or how often to reorder things.

Lack of vendor documentation is also an issue when it comes time to doing book-keeping. If you don’t have receipts or invoices to back up your purchases, it’s harder to write them off as tax-deductible expenses.

Receiving Vendor Response

Sometimes medical clinics don’t receive responses from their vendors in time to stock up on the things they need. Without hearing back from the vendors, you won’t know if they received your order, or if it will be here on time. The best thing you can do is hope and pray that they got your order.

When you have patients that rely on you for treatment, hoping and praying isn’t enough. You need to know that you’ll have the right tools, supplies, bandages, and more that they need before you can agree to treat them. Otherwise, you look unprofessional and may lose many patients.

Ordering Uncertainties

Without a system in place, it’s hard to know what to order. If you don’t have an automated system that tracks what you’ve got and what you need, you’ll have to manually tally what you have on hand. Things happen in a clinic constantly, and trying to tally your supplies when patients are coming in and out of the office is impossible.

Not knowing what you need can make it so that you get too much or too little of your medical supplies.

Scheduling Doesn’t Happen

The best way to ensure you’ve got what you need is to schedule times to review and restock your supplies. Not scheduling times to reorder means it’s up to chance whether your supplies get filled or not.

Even if your supplies get used more one month over another, it’s still smart to schedule time to re-evaluate what you have, what you need, and what you don’t use anymore.

Overcoming Medical Supply Ordering Obstacles

So now we’ve outlined the most common obstacles, what can help address them? Creating a vendor management process will address all of these obstacles.

In your vendor management process, you’ll probably want to assign one person to handle the duties. Having a head person to talk with your staff and vendors makes management centralized. They’ll know exactly what’s going on, what needs to happen for your clinic to receive your supplies, and how to interact with your vendors to ensure supplies get ordered in a timely manner.

Automating the Medical Supply Ordering Process

Along with having someone in charge of vendor management, you’ll also want a way to automate the ordering process. Do you have a system that tracks the number of items used, and then notifies managers when those items are running low? If not, Asset Panda can help you determine when you need to reorder supplies. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process and makes it so that you can get exactly what you need when you need it.