Optimizing Your Perioperative Supply Chain: A Guide to Improvement Projects. Toronto, ON. Retrieved from http://www.oha.com/services/supplychain/pages/optimizingyourperioperativesupplychainaguidetoimprovementprojects.aspx.

“Since first being identified as a key best practice for surgical efficiency, perioperative supply chain improvements have become a growing area of interest. While participating in a pilot program, 14 Ontario hospitals that undertook improvement projects reported significant decreases in supply costs, greater staff efficiencies and an overall more collaborative work environment.

Their experiences, which serve to inform this guide, found savings from a series of foundational projects, mostly focusing on refining inventory data, managing procedure card systems, optimizing surgical inventory and storage, and standardizing product.

The clinical and non-clinical leaders of these projects, supported by a network of subject matter experts, worked together to develop the guide. Divided into five chapters, each examines one of four foundational projects: Procedure Card Management; Data Optimization; OR Inventory Optimization and Product Selection and Standardization, with a fifth chapter serving as a refresher on Project Management.”