Steward Healthcare | Interview with Vice President of Supply Chain, Michael Prokopis

An inside look at Steward Health Care’s digital transformation journey

As the largest private, tax paying, physician-led healthcare network in the US, Steward Health Care boasts an extensive portfolio of 38 hospitals in the US and Malta. Having experienced a significant transformation in its offering over the past few years, the hospital prioritises the importance of first-class care to its patients. With procurement becoming increasingly influential to the way Steward Health Care operates, the firm created a shared services model which evaluates how the facilities are acquired. Michael Prokopis, Vice President of Supply Chain at Steward Health Care, discusses his company’s journey to transform its supply chain. “In shared services model, we have a number of different teams all working together,” he says. “We have a contracting department as well as a data team that helps us to understand the value metrics as well as reporting out to the facilities and observing how they’re doing on the KPIs. We have a procurement group which processes requisitions and turns them into purchase orders. We also have a value analysis wrapper, which allows us to evaluate from a clinical perspective how every single product that we introduce into the supply chain and deliver to our clinicians helps us decide whether it's better than something we're already using.”

Having taken steps to embrace digitalisation over the past couple of years, Steward Health Care is currently operating two ERPs and is well underway in its digital transformation journey. “We're on a digital path,” affirms Prokopis. “We know we’ve got to get to one enterprise resource planning capability, and we're in the process of undergoing that transformation now. What’s critically important from there is how you take that information and begin to use it, in order to get better consumption information at the point of care and understand what your inventory positions are. We’re also creating a mission control capability that will allow us to predict our ability to deliver care in advance. It’s not enough that we schedule a patient for an operating room procedure two or three weeks out. We also then have to understand what the nature of supply is and we can get the supply at the point of care when we need it.”

Click the cover below to read the full article...