Listen to this articleVUEMED is a healthcare technology company whose SaaS and Cloud-based solutions allow hospitals and their suppliers to track, manage, and document clinical supply and device usage throughout their supply chain and healthcare facilities. Below is our recent interview with Arnold Chazal, CEO & Co-Founder of VUEMED:
Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe VUEMED?
A: Our mission is to solve acute inventory management, supply chain, and product utilization documentation problems at hospitals with a suite of inventory, people, and asset tracking and optimization technologies. Our overarching vision is to transform the healthcare supply chain into a value chain, with tools that promote transparency and provide more comprehensive and accurate data to improve efficiency, savings, revenue capture, and patient care.
Recommended: Q: Can you give us insight into the motivation behind the founding of VUEMED and the problems that you’re trying to solve?
A: There are tens of thousands of medical devices and supplies needed for thousands of types of procedures and for very different patients with unique needs. Without accurate information about which items are needed for patient care, where they’re located in the hospital, and whether or not they’ve expired or been recalled, there are serious inefficiencies and potential risks to patients. In addition, clinical staff commonly have to use outdated and manual systems to document items used on a patient which leads to errors in medical records and billing. It’s a serious problem when products are wrongly documented and charged to the patient, or not documented at all. Any breakdown in the supply chain affects patients directly and puts patients at risk.
The healthcare supply chain also faces unique challenges that profoundly affect the overall cost of care. The lack of automation and smart technology in hospitals makes the management and documentation of supplies painstaking and all-too-often inaccurate, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars a year due to medical products that are wasted due to having expired on the shelves or been lost or damaged.
We founded VUEMED in order to solve these problems. Our “ah ha” moment came when we realized that neither the suppliers of medical products nor the hospitals knew how to manage their inventory. For one, there was so much waste everywhere, and second, there was no reliable data available in real-time to know what was taken off the shelf, what was expiring or recalled, or what needed to be ordered or replaced. Seeing the unreliable documentation of product usage at the point of care or a nurse pull out a paper ledger and go page by page, desperately examining stickers from product packages and handwritten notes to find out if a newly recalled product had been used in a procedure (with little faith that they had collected the right information to identify with certainty the patients at risk), made us realize that healthcare needed to adopt a 21st century approach to inventory management as other industries had already done.
Q: How do your solutions solve these problems?
A: Our automated data capture technologies report data to the Cloud in order to provide real-time visibility and trackability of medical products and supplies throughout the supply chain. Our advanced RAIN RFID solutions bridge the information gap between materials management and clinical areas in hospitals so that they have the most accurate communication on a product’s identity, availability, location, expiration date, and recall status – information which benefits the patients and empowers the organization to make well-informed decisions.
Q: Why VUEMED? What makes you the best choice and how do your customers benefit from your solutions?
A: Equipped with years of experience in robust Cloud infrastructure, superior data capture and reporting tools, and proven ROI-driven improvement programs, VUEMED’s SaaS and Cloud-based solutions bring modern tools to hospitals and their suppliers that enable them to track, manage, and document the usage of clinical supplies and devices throughout their supply chain and healthcare facilities. Our technology provides hospitals with powerful data, available within seconds, that enables them to optimize their inventories, prevent waste, and cut costs, as well as have proper risk management by controlling expirations and recalls, and ensuring the accuracy of patient records and billing.
VUEMED’s main platform is called VueTrack. The original version of VueTrack uses advanced barcode scanning to collect product data. Our main offering today is VueTrack-RF, the RAIN RFID version of VueTrack. What sets VueTrack-RF apart from competitors’ products is that it is hands-free and cabinet-free, and turns any space – whether a supply room, procedure room, or warehouse – into a fully controlled and automated inventory space using existing shelving, with real-time information about each product’s location, availability, usage, and expiration information.
One of our most popular solutions is VueSync, a Cloud-based master catalog and update service of more than 500,000 SKUs with their associated UDI info that provides 24/7 up-to-date, detailed, and accurate information about medical supplies, products, and devices. VueSync works in real time and ensures accurate data capture and documentation from point of entry to the point of care.
For a hospital, our solutions bridge the gap and silos between materials management and clinical areas in order to get the most accurate and timely communication of data on a product’s availability, location, and status (recalled, expired, used, returned, discarded, etc.). And for manufacturers, the advantage of our technology is to gain unprecedented visibility and trackability of their products (on consignment or not) from inside their own supply chain all the way inside the hospital to the point of care. Again, what has been used, what needs to be ordered according to par levels, where recalled items are, how many were used in patients, etc.
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Q: Any closing words for our readers?
A: Increasingly, hospitals are realizing that they need access to actionable data in order to generate the powerful analytics that inform their decision-making, especially when it comes to their supply chain optimization objectives. Too often, the data collected is incomplete, is not available, or is siloed in different hospital systems. This is where our expertise in data capture, automation, and Cloud analytics makes the difference, especially since we also bridge the silos by connecting all of the relevant datasets from different systems.
At VUEMED, we continue our efforts to reach deeper into the areas of the hospital that are in dire need of visibility and tracking, whether of supplies, people, or assets. We are also engaging in strategic partnerships to expand our reach and complement our existing offerings. For us, it is all about the empowerment of providers and caregivers through meaningful and actionable data, and how that data can be collected, generated, and analyzed using the most accurate and automated Cloud-based data capture technologies available today.
