John Freund, President & CEO, Jump Technologies
The onset of the covid-19 pandemic has put massive strains in the healthcare supply chain. The product distribution broke down when offshore manufacturers would not allow products to be shipped outside of their countries. Hospitals didn’t have the data they needed to manage their supplies, because the enterprise resource planning systems are designed to support purchasing inventory, not managing it beyond the loading dock. Although state and local governments stepped in to try to acquire supplies to help, this only created bidding wars with distributors, GPOs, and hospitals, which drove the costs of materials like masks from $.80 to as much as $10.00.
In short, every aspect of the healthcare supply chain broke during the pandemic and the cost of this failure was massive. The lack of PPE caused more people to get sick and caused many to die. Hospitals had to stop performing elective procedures in order to conserve PPE for staff treating COVID patients, which impacted patient health and resulted in huge financial losses for hospitals. In June 2020, the American Hospital Association posted an article entitled Hospitals and Health Systems Face Unprecedented Financial Pressures Due to COVID-19 where they estimated the financial loss to hospitals from the suspension of elective procedures to be $202.6 billion through June of 2020. Ultimately, the entire economy shut down, causing business failures and massive unemployment that has impacted people’s lives and wellbeing. It’s safe to say that disruptions in the supply chain can have impacts on our society that few ever dreamed imaginable.
Acknowledging the severity of the situation, Jump Technologies(JumpTech) is helping healthcare organizations reimagine the healthcare supply chain with increased resilience, transparency, and collaboration. The leading hospital supply chain and analytics company automates the tracking and documentation of medical supplies and implantable devices and empowers healthcare organizations with actionable insights into data to help them stay ahead of critical supplies and save lives.
A Glance into the Fascinating Journey of JumpTech
Jump Technologies has been providing supply chain software solutions across a variety of industries since 2001. In 2015, the company began directly marketing its software solutions to the healthcare industry and quickly discovered that hospitals were running their supply chain operations on technology that was at least 20 years behind other industries. That is when John Freund, President, and CEO of JumpTech, decided to sell off all aspects of his business outside of healthcare, allowing him to focus the company’s resources and talents on helping to improve hospital supply chain operations to save both lives and money.
“When you think of it, the healthcare supply chain should be leading the world in new technology adoption as it is the most important supply chain in our lives. If you run out of stock in healthcare, people get sick or even die. Ironically, there is better technology in place to ensure that a retail store has the right color and style of a dress in stock than there is to make sure a nurse has PPE (personal protective equipment),” asserts Mr. Freund.
This fact was unacceptable to the team at JumpTech and they set their mission to reimagine the healthcare supply chain to save lives. The company offers a cloud-based, software solution called JumpStock that integrates with any enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and/or electronic medical record (EMR) system, making implementation fast and easy and requiring minimal involvement by hospital IT staff.
Supporting Healthcare Providers in the Crucial Time of Need
When the pandemic first hit US shores, Freund realized that his business was about to change. “Our primary point of contact in a hospital is the Vice President of Supply Chain. Those individuals and their staff were in the battle of their lives trying to stay ahead of COVID. We couldn’t think of selling them software,” says Mr. Freund.
JumpTech offer edits software platform free of charge to hospitals in need of a tool to help them better manage their PPE and other critical supplies. Over 50 hospitals and health systems reached out to JumpTech looking for help.
“The most critical problem these facilities faced was the lack of visibility into their inventory beyond their loading docks. Hospitals expense inventory once it is delivered to a department. At that point, it is off their books and out of their systems. As you can imagine, during a pandemic, knowing where every piece of inventory is located in your whole hospital or health system is vitally important,” explains Mr. Freund.
Hospitals that took advantage of JumpTech’s offer were able to gain visibility into how much inventory they had, where it was located, how fast it was being used, who was using it, and when they were forecasted to run out. While sharing their experience with JumpTech, Ruth Gregory, Director of Materials Distribution at Nuvance Health in Lagrangeville, NY says, “JumpStock gave us the visibility we needed to properly manage our inventory and provide the reporting required to our senior management. It was up and running quickly and is simple to use, both key attributes when you don’t have a lot of time to be working with new software.”
Enabling Data Sharing Across the Entire Supply Chain
According to Mr. Freund, to better prepare for future pandemics, hurricanes, floods, or other disasters that impact the flow of goods to hospitals, the healthcare system needs to rethink the entire supply chain — from the ground up. Hospitals, distributors, and GPOs need to understand manufacturing capacity. Hospitals need to understand the capabilities of their distributors. The government needs to understand the aggregate data to play a role in building local and national stockpiles. And all parties need to understand consumption velocity at hospitals to better forecast and respond to demand. There has to be transparency up and down the whole supply chain.
JumpTech is working to help build a collaborative ecosystem that allows data sharing across the entire supply chain. Freund found that during the pandemic, customers in New York were struggling to keep up, while customers in the center of the country had plenty of PPE on the shelf. Those with plenty were hesitant to share with struggling hospitals for fear that when COVID hit them, they would be left short. He believes that a transparent ecosystem where manufacturers, distributors, GPOs, state and federal governments, and hospitals are all sharing data is needed to help ensure patient and staff safety during times of critical need. JumpTech is focused on reimagining the healthcare supply chain to be the data provider to that ecosystem.
“This is a significant undertaking, but now is the time to do it. The new normal of the healthcare supply chain is being defined now and supply chain executives need to show leadership during this time,” affirms Mr. Freund.
Reshaping the Future of Healthcare Supply Chain
Today, JumpTech offers solutions that allow hospitals and health systems to visualize the data they need across all of their facilities. It is simple to implement, affordable and with over 150 hospitals using it, it’s a safe choice for supply chain leaders. Moving towards the future, the pioneering company aims to continue offering such innovative and reliable solutions to its customers while staying true to its mission of improving the healthcare supply chain to save lives.
“We have a history of working with our clients on difficult problems and coming up with workable solutions. We look forward to not only partnering with our customers and other stakeholders in the healthcare supply chain but to driving change that allows the industry to collectively reimagine the healthcare supply chain to save lives,” concludes Mr. Freund.