It’s Not Hard for Healthcare to Go Digital – The Digital Healthcare Supply Chain

Rather than still relying on paper in their purchasing departments, hospitals and clinics need to be seriously considering digitalizing their entire supply chain. But won’t that be difficult? No, not with the shared expertise of Supedio GmbH and SEEBURGER AG, two experienced partners who cooperate to offer you the solutions you need.

The Healthcare Supply Chain

We live in an era in which we order stuff with a click on our smartphones. Availability is checked in real time, delivery times are getting ever shorter, and we can even follow a parcel all the way to our doorstep. Digitalization has arrived in everyone’s domestic lives. In many hospitals, however, this scenario is still a long way off.  Believe it or not, in many medical centers, paper still plays a key role in purchasing. But why?

Quite simply, breaking up existing structures, connecting suppliers, creating synchronized master data for materials, and exchanging digital orders, invoices, delivery bills, or even order confirmations is anything but simple. It takes effort. However, a digital supply chain in healthcare offers a whole range of opportunities.

What are the benefits of a digital healthcare supply chain?

• Purchasers no longer have to worry about incorrect invoices.
• There’s no need to manually check, update or correct master data for materials.
• Information flowing between the two parties is automatically processed, and no longer needs to be extensively verified by employees.
• The information needed to fulfill the order flows digitally between the various parties, and a quicker order process means quicker delivery.

In short, it’s not just the purchasing department which benefits, but everyone – including the patients.

But how can you turn a healthcare supply chain digital?

The key to easily making a digital supply chain a reality is getting experienced partners on board. SEEBURGER AG and Supedio GmbH are two digitalization experts who already work together to help other companies make their digital supply chain a reality:

• Supedio is all about master data management and converting PDF files into digital data, while
• SEEBURGER has the expertise in converting the digital formats so they can be communicated between systems.
• Supedio digitizes pdf documents such as an order, delivery note or an invoice into structured data, which is then communicated between systems (known as machine to machine (M2M) communication) through electronic data interchange (EDI for short).

As the systems swapping digital data often don’t speak the same digital languages, the data needs converting– while still being sent securely.  This is where SEEBURGER comes in.

As well as digitizing pdf files, Supedio also provides another crucial element for a digital supply chain: accurate master data.  This is a service which verifies product master data as well as matching the address records held by the clinics and suppliers.  This means that the messages in the ordering process all contain the correct information and all parties involved can correctly assign and process them.

So that the clinics and medical suppliers can communicate securely with each other, and their data records verified, the SEEBURGER Business Integration Suite (BIS) is set up for both supplier and clinic.  SEEBURGER BIS is a central platform which provides versatile connectivity options, mappings and APIs, as well as an efficient B2B Onboarding Service. A central integration management tool draws the data from the various sources and prepares it for further use.

Together, Supedio and SEEBURGER provide an excellent foundation for meeting the ever faster changing demands in the healthcare industry. Intelligent master data management, an integration platform and simple onboarding of the clinics and suppliers involved are all important steps in digitalizing a healthcare supply chain.

However, it’s only those who take the first step who have any chance of mastering the upcoming challenges of digitalization in healthcare. Get in touch for a no-obligation consultation today!