Easy order system for materials services customers

At the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven, CT, the system for identifying and delivering items requested in between regular deliveries to patient care units was not efficient. The Materials Services Center (MSC) staff was frustrated at having to second-guess the needs of the medical floors, and the nursing staff was irate over the number of errors in the supplies they received. In addition, floors were borrowing supplies from each other, and the charges were being lost in the shuffle. The Materials Services Department solved the problem by developing a catalog and order transaction forms that matched requests with standard item numbers and descriptions. Customer satisfaction is way up and lost charges are way down as a result.