Director, SCM Inventory
Services COE, Cleveland Clinic
August 2023- The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Mike Novak is the Director of the Inventory Management Center of Excellence, at the Cleveland Clinic. He leads an enterprise team of implementation managers and analysts that are focused on:
- Implementation and support of enterprise inventory management systems and strategy, including clinical point of use
- Deployment of standard inventory processes and workflows
- New hospital activations, including new build and integration projects
- Strategic initiative project management and consulting services for Supply Chain Operations
- Identification and implementation of inventory savings and cost avoidance opportunities
- Subject matter expertise for inventory control and valuation accounting and auditing
- Coordination of monthly supply conversion activity
- Inventory system end-user support
Any recent stories of successfulprojects you can share?
Over the past 18 months, we’ve been busy with a handful of large-scale enterprise strategic projects, such as; (1) continued expansion of our inventory management transformation program across the enterprise; (2) the opening of two newly built hospitals, one being in London, England; (3) supply chain system conversions of 6 recently acquired hospitals.
The keys to our success on all these projects, is our team’s solution focused approach, ability to work cross-functionally with clinical and other support services, and our passion around the work – we understand the importance our solutions have on the delivery of high-quality patient care.
How do you measure the success of your team and its impact on the organization as a whole?
The success within our team is measured by the expansion and support of our inventory strategy, systems, and processes across the enterprise. The impact to the organization is that we have enhanced visibility into our inventory enabling us to optimize our materials and clinical workflows and empowering our materials management teams to deliver quality and consistent service to our caregivers.
Over the past seven years, our team has deployed our clinical inventory management system (mix of RFID and Kanban) in over 150 departments, spanning across 35 facilities. Included in these deployments are over 450 point-of-use devices, throughout our ORs and Procedural spaces, which are highly integrated with our EMR. We currently have over $130M of inventory managed in our clinical spaces, which provides enhanced visibility into inventory and usage across the enterprise.
What’s the biggest takeaway for you as a supply chain leader over the last few years of marketplace disruptions?
The importance of having real-time visibility into inventory and utilization. Our enterprise leverages this as an important data point when making critical clinical decisions, such as; preparedness to resume surgical case volume and our PPE protocols through COVID, or response strategy around the increase in supply disruptions (i.e. tourniquet cuffs).
What are the most important attributes of a successful supply chain team today?
- Several come to mind:
- Resilient
- Clinically integrated
- Innovative
- Automated
- Data-Driven
- Quality Master Data