UChicago Medicine celebrates supply chain career development, progress

Employee Engagement consists of three subcommittees. They are: 

•       Learning and Development, which focuses on identifying in-house opportunities for professional development and connecting staff to the identified resources.

•        Recognition, which has developed a formalized process for recognizing contributions by staff members. Any employee can nominate their peers for recognition, and awards are given out at the Quarterly All-Employee Meeting.

•        Safety, which is responsible for providing safety training and reinforcing UCM Safety initiatives, such as Code Silver, Ergonomics, and Environmental Awareness. 

Interweaving the accomplishments of these subcommittees into routine daily operations, such as contracting and value analysis among others, demonstrates the essentialness and importance that Supply Chain places on the work, according to Ian O’Malley, director, Strategic Sourcing Clinical. 

“As part of Value Analysis, we understand the devices we are evaluating impact stakeholders on a number of levels at our organization and beyond,” O’Malley noted. “Device safety is an important component of any Value Analysis review, and our teams work to include this metric as part of any trial we begin. Post-implementation, our Quality team keeps track of safety events to ensure we are not seeing any concerning events tied to new devices we have implemented.  An often, but not discussed, element of device evaluation is the ergonomics of the user – our clinicians. Our teams work very closely with our clinicians on trials and work to get the product in the hands of as many users as we can to ensure the trial has the largest sample size we can reasonably achieve. If a device places undue stress on the user, such as fatigue due to poor design, complexity in use or unnecessary steps adding frustration, our teams factor that into the ultimate decision to engage in a conversion. 

“The teams always have an eye towards Environmental Awareness and waste reduction when we look at new devices or utilization opportunities, too,” he continued. “We are always looking to minimize our waste footprint through reprocessing programs and high-compliant collections, but also working to collaborate with device manufacturers in contracting for those that produce devices that can be reprocessed or collected for recycling programs. Our utilization projects tied to waste reduction are reported out at the Value Analysis meetings. Some of these are surgical pack audits, 'No Ask, No Open' projects to reduce opening products in the OR that aren't needed, and surgical cost-per-case reviews with surgeons to validate what we show as being used is accurate and that they are aware of what is being attributed to their case costs.” 

“We’ve formalized eight career paths that include all entry-level through manager roles,” Kosovec noted. “As the career paths were developed, they created important alignment in the senior leadership team. After they were created, they were made available to all teams and have provided a foundation for advancement conversations, which are critical for the development and retention of employees. By having these documents available to all teams, it enables transparent communication around expectations about opportunities available at each role.”