The healthcare industry overspends on its supply chain by over $25B each year, largely due to fragmented, unharnessed data, inefficient workflows, and wasted supplies. Significant supply chain disruptions, including major weather events, global pandemics, and economic tariffs, are poised to further impact hospitals in the coming months and years.
Clarium is revolutionizing the healthcare supply chain industry with its AI-powered platform, Astra OS. This platform provides real-time visibility and intelligent automation to unlock efficiency for hospitals and suppliers.
Impact
Reduced disruption resolution time by 35%
Disruption Monitor is a web-based software module that unifies data across all systems of record to allow health systems to proactively manage inventory at an enterprise level. The platform also tracks early warning signals from across Clarium’s two-sided network of data (supplier, EDI, FDA) and surfaces potential disruptions.
The embedded workflow tool in the platform enables providers to automate assignments, notifications, information gathering and clinical approvals – automating a process that would otherwise occur over emails, Teams messages or phone calls. The platform allows leaders to track key productivity metrics and optimize resource allocation.
“Before Clarium, my team had to log into 5 different systems and run 3 different reports to find out all the information about a specific item -that is now available to them in a single screen.”, said Christine L’Heureux, Director of Supply Chain at Boston Children’s Hospital. “One of my team leads told me they would cry if I took this tool away”, she added.
Reduced substitute approval time by 45%
The embedded workflow tool in the platform enables providers to automate assignments, notifications, information gathering and clinical approval – automating a process that would otherwise occur over emails or phone calls. The performance metrics allow leaders to track performance, find and mitigate risks, and optimize resource allocation.
The crowdsourced substitute list is another key efficiency drivers of this platform. Steve Liou, CEO of Clarium Health explains: “Each provider in the network participates in a give-to-get model. They agree to share their approved substitute list with the network at an aggregated, deidentified level, and in return receive access to approved substitutes from all other participating providers in the network.”
In addition to substitutes approved by other providers in the network, value analysis teams can see a list of options including previously approved substitutes and cross-reference items recommended by their distributor and other vendors. “We moved our substitution process out of Smartsheet and into Clarium to increase visibility and ownership of the process. Our stakeholders and end users (customers) are now able to track their substitution request from the creation, through each step along the way (Value Analysis approval -> Infor Item Creation -> DED creation -> Inventory Update -> Complete)”, said Eileen Kennedy, Value Analysis Manager at Yale New Haven Health, who led the implementation of the substitute process. “Our nurses love the images, so does our materials team!”, she added.
Achieved cost reduction of $1.4M in labor savings
The cost of a supply disruption can be measured in lost revenue, loss in productivity, loss in market share, competitiveness, and customer satisfaction. The Business Continuity Institute has estimated the cost of a single supply chain disruption to be between $610,000 and $3.5 million, depending on the industry. Since the platform currently helps mitigate risk at the provider, we have chosen to focus on measurable savings at the mitigation level.
The above efficiency gains amount to this large dollar figure after factoring in the number of disruptions and substitution requests managed, for a single provider. The resources needed to handle a single supply disruption can span across 5 different teams, and average 8 hours of total time spent. With the platform streamlining workflows and communication, we shave off an average of 3 hours per disruption. Scaling for the sheer number of disruptions per year, we estimate over $1.4M in projected annual savings for employee time alone. “Our goal when partnering with Clarium was to streamline our operations, improve customer satisfaction, give our team the tools they need to succeed.”, said Jacqueline Epright, VP and Chief Supply Chain Officer at Yale New Haven Health. “The savings we achieved along the way are a cherry on top of the cake.”, she added.
Customer adoption is up 125% YTD
User centric design is a core product design value at Clarium. “We place the user at the center of everything we do – and design our platform to be intuitive and constantly evolve based on usage patterns and customer feedback.”, said Jacopo Spina, lead product designer at Clarium Health.
The growing customer adoption is a testament to this fact. “We initially built this tool for our Procurement, Value Analysis, Contracting and Analytics teams. As more teams started to see the tool and what it is capable of, the user base soon expanded to Clinical Materials, Inventory management, and even our clinical end users.”, said Carolyn Yaccarino, Director of Integration and Change Management at YNHH. She added, “Our teams continue to be amazed at the speed of development and how receptive the Clarium team is to our feedback.”
What is next?
Clarium Health has expanded its list of provider partners to add a few more leading health systems (can name them). In the near term, we are working to continue expanding the network and building additional products and features to reduce cost and increase efficiency and resiliency.
