New Item Master Item Justification

I know that we have implemented such a system... but I'm quite sure that we are not putting everything into the Lawson item master. I'm not a functional user... but I know a few. They may be interested in speaking with you about it.
We implemented a modified IC527 interface to Cerner's Surginet and we have an interface coming back that is for the "used" items and automatically re-ordering them if below par. That's as much as I know about it though.
Interested in possibly following up on it? I can talk to the people that know.

If surgery has items that they bill for, they are usually built into the Item Master, regardless of how often they are used, since their item feed usually comes from Lawson. That's just what I've seen.

We interface our item master from Lawson to Epic Optime. All items are interfaced via a modified IC527. It does create a huge item master. We have over 12,000 tiems for the ORs.

We lost the battle of keeping only functional items in our item master when the hospital went live with EPIC Optime (operating rooms, two surgery centers, digestive health center, labor and delivery). If they are going to bill for it, we build it in Lawson in the item master and as a non-inventory tracked item location and have a custom interface pick up the information and send it daily to EPIC. Its only going to get bigger too - we are getting ready to go live next year with EPIC CUPID.

So, there are actually a couple of things to talk about...
1) We also "lost" the fight (and I did fight it). We have loaded over 60K items (especially in the Total Joint venue) in the last twelve months. Now Spine and CRM are looking to get into the system and I don't have enough staff or mood-stabilizers to get through that 'project.'

2) Philosophically, what this really comes down to is the "single source of truth" for your items, and it is NOT Lawson. (Okay, we are making it be the SSOT, but it is really not the best tool for this purpose.) This is really about Master Data Management (MDM), and the ideal solution would be an Item "hub". In the spoke-and-hub model of MDM, your MDM application is the container of all of your item informtation. All of the transacting systems (Lawson, Cerner, Pisys (Pysis?), Epic, etc) would pull the information that they need from the MDM hub, but no more. There is a LOT MORE to this, but it would basically allow each consuming system to only focus on the data elements needed to complete its transactions, and you would not need to manage data not needed by that system. But all of this is probably way off most healthcare systems' radar.

All of this to say that I empathize with your situation.
Good luck,

Thank you for all of the responses!

I'm afraid that enough surgery people are going to start complaining and we will also conceded. My main concern goes back to managing the system: With a larger amount of items to manage/add it would take someone in our materials management a LOT of time coordinating with the various departments, vendors, GPO, etc.. to take care of it.

Greg: I may be interested in talking to some folks about this from your facility.

Lynne: Did you customize the IC527 yourself?

Red: What system do you use as the Master Data Management for items? Lawson IS ours at the moment.

Whatever you decide to do, if you are going to interface out of Lawson. The items need to be at least entered at the lowest UOM possible. We learned this through great pains, and spent many hours entering alternate UOM's on many of our items.

If you are a Unix shop, I can send you the IC527 script that I wrote to customize our interface.

Jeremy,
Lawson is also our "MDM" application for items, for lack of any available alternative. Sorry if I mislead you there. We do have a system-wide group looking at electronic data. They have already created MDM hubs for "Patient" and "Physician", using an IBM application (but I am not sure which one). Huge kudoes to them, but, again, this is more EHR-centered. I think they were looking at another vendor, I am not completely in that loop. What I can say is that MDM for items (also known as Product Information Management [I think] or PIM [more certain]) is a different flavor of MDM than people-based information. So, a vendor may be strong on the people but weak on the product (or Product Strong, but PeopleSoft...sorry).

If anyone is interested in learning more, I attended a Data Management conference in 2012. It was a two-day event with a smattering of vendors, customers and consultants/experts (kind of like CUE/Inforum, but able to fit in a single conference room). I know that they have an annual event early in the year in San Francisco, late in the year in New York, and in Canada somewhere in between. I can look back through my e-mails to get a number of different contacts.

Enjoy,
Red

Yes, I customized the IC527. I copied it and went from there, so as not to alter Lawson's original.

Whatever MMIS you use it should be the source of truth for supply item data (cost, vendor, mfg, uom conversions, etc.) for any clinical system. We interface Lawson to our IR/Cath Lab system (HI-IQ). We also have a dedicated position in MM to manage the item master files in Lawson and Cerner Surginet/Pharmnet. We are in the process of standardizing the CDM creation process and hope to move this to that position as well.

Both here and at my previous system, we sent item information to the Surgery charging system, but we did not load ALL items. We enter the word "Surgery" in the IC11 User Field 4 which triggers the interface to send the information to Cerner Surginet. Items that are not loaded Lawson or Surginet are manually entered in Surginet for the charge. We have received the same push from Surgery to add all of the items to the Lawson system, but have been able to hold off so far. Items in Lawson are managed by my team in Supply Chain, items in Surginet are managed by people in Surgery, and the interface is managed by IT which is a pain when there are issues.

At the last place I worked we did not use Lawson, but we also did not interface the MMIS to the surgery charging system. They were a step within the item add/change process along with revenue cycle and would add the items in their system by category, so all of the same type of screws within a size and price range were given the same charge code. It was a many to one relationship instead of a one to one we have in Lawson.

In my experience, Supply Chain will never win this particular battle because the CFOs like the idea of the low-usage items being tracked. These are often odd sizes of a consignment or something sitting in a tray.

We've got 38K skus in our OR and I did a custom sql to interface to Optime as we put Latex flags in the user fields and use the IC11.3 to store the un-abbreviated description (Optime's Nurse's Alias) and some others. We use PC10 to store the Epic EAP (CDM).

I am allowed to inactivate the discontinued product - basically, I'm using GHX's NuVia. If it is an active item that GHX calls "obsolete" it is sent to the vendor rep to confirm and then axed.

We went from SIS to Epic OpTime a couple years ago. From what I understand, SIS allowed for item adds without the item interfacing from Lawson & Epic does not, so our item master has exploded like everyone else's. We also use IC11 to send calculated costs when necessary, C Codes & Latex information to Epic.
As Greg mentions, stick with EA as your LUM whenever possible. If Materials Mgmt insists on a different Issue UOM (like with gloves) I have to enter a conversion factor for EA that is < 1 that a formula picks up behind the scenes so that the proper cost is reflected in Epic. Not fun.

As a sourcing and spend analytics consultant in healthcare (and other industries), I ascribe to the philosophy of “if you can’t see it, you can’t hit it”. The item master drives so much more than inventory these days. Many industries used to only put direct Materiels into their item masters and lost control over the rest of their spend. Healthcare does the same. We often don’t know what we buy, how we buy, what prices we pay for the same or similar items, or have multiple contracts in place with the same vendors. Attacking these issues, and using the data strategically to reduce redundancy and achieve variation reduction for clinicians and supply chain is a win win in any circumstance. And, it can save an organization millions of dollars a year as a result.

A large item master can be a pain to manage and govern, but the benefits far outweigh the difficulties. Large corporations like Medtronic and Abbott are using Data “lakes” for managing their corporations’ master data where their various systems access the data needed to transact their businesses. Red was correct and prescient in advising this 4 years ago. Healthcare organizations relying on multiple systems to access and process master data for various needs (revenue, purchasing, inventory, outcomes, clinical integration with supply chain, understanding the total loaded cost -and value -of care, would be well advised to do the same instead of relying on their ERP system to house all data.

One more point- given FDA requirements for Serialization and traceability for healthcare organizations, using the GTIN info is essential. Including the UOM provided by the Manufacturer you can use a conversion factor in you data but your master data has to incorporate the GTIN UOM