Materiel management: time for a new beginning

Industry forecasters have predicted that most hospitals will belong to a multi-hospital system or an alliance by the end of this decade or they will simply disappear. This will concomitantly expand and contract the role of materiel managers, while creating new challenges for them in free-standing hospitals or in a multi-hospital system environment. What should materiel management's role be in this new arena? What functions or activities should materiel management be responsible for functionally or administratively? How should a hospital or multi-hospital system's materiel management department be organized to meet this new challenge? What relationship should evolve between hospital divisions and the system's materiel management department? Who should control the purchasing, inventories, and distribution for hospital divisions? What functions should be centralized and what should be decentralized? The answers to these questions will be discussed in this article.