Improving Patient Care Through Supply Chain Digitalization: Why Boston Medical Center Chose TraceLink

My name is Ross Casey. I'm the Director of Supply Chain and 340B Optimization for Boston Medical Center.

Boston Medical Center is a disproportionate share hospital. We have a very high "dis" percentage, which indicates we care for a lot of indigent patients, patients that are uninsured, underinsured. Our patient population, unfortunately, suffers from homelessness, a lot of substance use disorder, HIV, Hep-C, and the health literacy, unfortunately, is not where it needs to be.

Because of these things, the 340B program is something that we leverage very highly and try to optimize. And what that does is to basically stretch scarce federal resources and expand our services to those patients in need. If we're able to optimize the supply chain and the 340B program to decrease our costs, we then take those savings and we expand our services for those patients.

Optimizing the supply chain is of paramount importance in order to meet the patient needs. Our first priority is obviously always making sure we have the right medication in the right quantity at the right time for the patient in order to meet their needs. And pharmacy supply chain, like most supply chains on the macro global level, is very stressed.

So, making sure that we have visibility into the market and being able to predict when medications are gonna become short. And ensuring that we have the product in hand when we need it for our patients to meet those patient expectations and not negatively affect those clinical outcomes, is of paramount importance.

One of the challenges that we have in supply chain is sourcing products from a multitude of vendors, wholesalers, manufacturers, and every single one of those vendors that we work with has a different need on how data is exchanged. Specifically for our invoices, we have manufacturers and wholesalers that communicate with us in different fashions.

Some may have an EDI, some may be sending us invoices via an SFTP process. Others are just emailing us, and sometimes that email gets lost in the exchange. Those invoices don't get into our ERP. Our accounts payable team doesn't know them, and we're unable to pay our dues on time, only because of that lack of efficient data exchange.

So, as we look to TraceLink and MINT, we think this is a profound opportunity for us because if we can exchange that data with the manufacturers directly, even simply in an invoice, we can streamline that, get those invoices into our ERP, and we can pay those bills on time.

One example: We have a manufacturer that we buy one medication from directly. We have an $18 million annual spend for that drug. We have a 2% prompt pay discount baked into our contract. And if we don't pay on time, we could be foregoing $360,000 a year, which is significant.

Think about the additional clinical programs or staff we can hire in order to support patient care with that money. So, it's paramount importance that we are able to exchange this data with manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, whoever it may be, in live time.

And I think TraceLink is very powerful because of the market share that you have and the amount of data you have. Leveraging that is key for, you know, optimizing the supply chain. One of the major things that we struggle with in the supply chain is drug shortages.

And so, you guys, leveraging the amount of vast data you have and the market share, you're able to make those predictions on specific NDCs, whether they're going to be short or not, predictions one day, seven days, 90 days in advance. That is so beneficial, so useful for us, to make sure that we have the medications that we need for our patients when we need them.

We take your data. We use it. We merge it over with our own internal data, when we're looking from our wholesalers and failure to supply. That allows us the visibility to know what's happened previously, what's happening in the future, to make an informed decision.

Started that journey working with you guys on expanded programs outside of just the DSCSA compliance. And now we're looking to implement MINT, which I think is gonna be a huge, huge impact for us.