Richmond, VA December 4 Owens & Minor, a distributor of medical/surgical supplies, announced today that it has signed an interim agreement with Moses Cone Health System, a private not-for-profit, five-hospital, healthcare system based in Greensboro, N.C. Why all the chumminess? The two companies hope their relationship will result in a model healthcare supply chain for the industry to follow.
Under the agreement, Moses Cone Health System will outsource its materials management function to Owens & Minor. Working together, the two companies plan to streamline the hospital's supply chain, with a specific cost-reduction target. Owens & Minor will assume the on-site management of the materials department for the five facilities, installing a manager with a team of employees to serve the Moses Cone system. The two companies will then work together to design and implement materials management using supply chain management techniques.
In implementing this new supply chain, Moses Cone Health System will use CostTrack, Owens & Minor's activity-based management system; and WISDOM2, the company's Internet-based data mining tool. Owens & Minor also provided on-site logistics consulting to prepare for the transition of these services. In working together, Owens & Minor will redesign the flow of the supply chain within the hospitals in the system.
"All of us at Moses Cone Health System are very excited about the opportunity to create a new kind of relationship with Owens & Minor," said Paul Summerell, vice president of Moses Cone Health System. "We believe that applying the supply chain expertise of Owens & Minor within a broadly successful healthcare provider system like Moses Cone will help both organizations in achieving their objectives. This really has the potential to become a model for healthcare supply chain development in the future."
Moses Cone Health System was recently voted among "the top 100 most wired health systems in the nation" in the ranking compiled each year by Hospitals & Health Networks Magazine. Also, Owens & Minor ranked first in this year's InformationWeek 500, a list of the nation's most innovative users of technology.
