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Showing posts from August, 2012

The Importance of Keeping Track of Inventory

Last week, the healthcare IT blog HIStalk ("HIS" = health information systems, not a blog only for men) commented on a story from The Miami Herald   about missing inventory. Without clicking on these links, one may think that the missing inventory might have only been a few office supplies in a medical records office. On the contrary, the University of Miami experienced $14 million in medicine/drug inventory shrinkage. $14 million!!! Surely, tracking inventory can be very expensive financially and very costly timewise. Whether a system runs on manual data entry (written, typed), UPC barcodes, RFID, GPS, or other methods & technologies, the actions needed to keep an active, accurate count can be difficult and disruptive. Furthermore, both human errors and system errors occur, resulting in discrepancies--miscounts, mispicks, incorrect valuation, etc. Perfection is something to strive for, not something that is--inventory management is no exception. Still, the case of p...