Self-Managing, Autonomous Supply Rooms to Alleviate Staffing and Operational Burdens
Chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) of healthcare organizations should prepare to replace manual inventory counting with supply rooms that use AI and computer vision to track supplies and trigger replenishment, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.
Advances in AI, computer vision and workflow automation are making it increasingly feasible for healthcare supply rooms to sense inventory conditions, predict demand and initiate replenishment with minimal human involvement.
“Hospitals have spent years buying technology that helps employees count supplies, but employees are still doing the counting,” said Bruce Gilmore, VP Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice. “AI and computer vision create an opportunity to remove that work, rather than make it incrementally faster. This can enable nurses to spend more time with patients, rather than searching for missing items in stockrooms.”
Gartner research points to a number of benefits to implementing autonomous supply rooms, including providing administrators with a real-time view of available supplies and enabling the management of a wider range of growing products at scale. Additionally, autonomous periodic automatic replenishment (PAR) rooms can help directly address four ongoing challenges facing healthcare providers today (see Figure 1). (....)