Partnering with RGIS to Make a Difference
PROBLEMThrough recent acquisitions, Boston Scientific had grown to thousands of field representatives that service physicians with critical care components. These devices are not only valuable, but also crucial to the company who must know where the devices are located; should critical patients need them implanted with urgency. Accurate deployment of these life-giving devices could mean life or death to a sick or dying patient.
The in-house program of tracking the devices had become ineffective due to field representative unresponsiveness, inability to capture the data accurately in a consistent format over a manageable time frame, and a variety of pre-existing business practices from the now consolidated company. Field representatives were on-call for critical care issues, and needed to stay focused on delivery of service to surgeons. Each of the thousands of field reps could have multiple stocking locations at local hospitals, clean rooms, doctors' offices and storage areas. Stocking locations sometimes crossed state boundaries and product was transferred from location to location, and representative to representative daily. Attempts to conduct large-scale audits had met with incomplete and invalid data.
SOLUTIONRGIS developed custom data capture programs that validated the representative’s number and stocking location to the data captured. The item numbers of the devices were validated at the point of entry, which ensured any un-encoded devices were discovered at the time of the inventory, not upon reconciliation. The program was also designed to capture representative business practice compliance data at the time of the audit. This provided actionable data to change behavior to comply with client company policy.
RGIS utilized its existing network of highly trained medical inventory specialists, and designed a certification program for the specialist’s specific to the client needs. After certifying the network of employees, each representative had all locations audited over the course of 5 days. A process that had previously taken months with poor accuracy and no compliance data collection had been consolidated into a 5 day period, delivering accurate data validated on several levels. Audits were scheduled through a single point of contact, conducted with results posted in a consistent format on a secure server. Compliance data for each audit was posted separately on the same server delivering actionable information to allow the customer to process improved daily business practices across its distributed network of reps. The client actually recovered devices previously written off as lost, which actually paid for the cost of service.