Healthcare Supply Chain Onsite Logistics: Five Key Services to Centralize

A hospital is a microcosm. It runs like a small city, with services ranging from facilities and waste management to food, hospitality, supply delivery, and patient support; even without mentioning all the medical care provided. Each function is essential, yet many of the support-related tasks end up on the shoulders of clinical staff whose training is best reserved for patient care or other specialized activities.

When nurses, and other skilled professionals, spend time on support and logistics activities such as stocking bedside carts, running oxygen tanks, or cleaning durable medical equipment, their job satisfaction declines and turnover rises. A 2023 McKinsey study* found that nurses spend up to 10% of their time on duties that could be delegated to support teams. Central processing technicians, therapists, and technologists face similar challenges.

For the strategic supply chain executive, this is more than an efficiency issue. It’s a strategic one. Leaders must take a holistic look at labor and activity management, addressing opportunities across the organization rather than supporting the legacy puzzle pieces of hospital operations. This article highlights five services areas where consolidation and centralization can improve operations for tasks, if left unaddressed, can quietly drain resources and erode staff satisfaction. 

Supply Chain leadership can create significant value by addressing a handful of key tasks and centralizing them within shared services where effort can be measured and processes standardized. The result is time returned to clinical staff, allowing them to focus on patient-facing care instead of non-nursing tasks. We explore five areas of work that place surprising impacts on staff time. We are referring to labor that is often underestimated by administrative leadership.

1. Case Picking:  A medical center may devote 20 hours a day to picking 80–100 cases. The 10–15 minutes required to gather soft goods and instruments for each case is commonly spent by certified sterile processing technicians who could otherwise be focused on cleaning, assembling, and sterilizing critical instrumentation. These tasks can often be shifted to non-specialized materials management staff, who are already familiar with the soft goods but may require some education on the instrumentation.
2. Medical Equipment Management: BD’s instructions for use state that cleaning and disinfecting an Alaris medical pump unit takes 6–8 minutes per device, a task often completed by nursing staff. For a hospital re-circulating 350 units per day, this can result in as much as 35 hours of lost nursing time daily. Additional risks are introduced when busy care staff members rush through critical disinfection steps, especially when multiple devices are needed simultaneously.
3. Medical Tanks – At first glance, moving empty and full oxygen tanks, or other specialty gases, may seem like a simple task. In practice, the sheer volume of gas cylinders and their dispersed, restricted storage locations make the task daunting. For a medical center using 80 tanks daily, exchanges can consume as much as 10 staff hours per day, much of it spent simply transporting tanks to and from secluded storage rooms.
4. Wheelchairs, Stretchers, and Other Durable Medical Equipment: Having the right equipment readily available is central to nursing operations, yet access and storage remain ongoing challenges. Units often end up with too much of one type of equipment (e.g., IV poles, shower chairs) while lacking others. Retrieval, cleaning, and redistribution either take nurses and aides off the unit to search for equipment or consume valuable space with unnecessary storage.
5. Bedside Cart Replenishment – Medical centers often rely on 150 or more bedside carts in their Emergency Departments and ICUs. Stocking these carts typically falls to nursing or aides and can account for 15 hours of labor per day. Some hospitals check and replenish these carts multiple times daily, creating a critical but labor-intensive task that requires well-defined processes for supply acquisition, cart transport, and room replenishment.

Taken together, just four of these five tasks, where quantified, account for an estimated 80 hours of labor per day. That equates to more than 10 full-time equivalents (FTEs) if properly staffed and planned, rather than being absorbed as “extra” work by clinical teams. The assignment of these tasks to the appropriate staff members not only improves efficiency and clinician satisfaction but also delivers clear financial benefit. 

Hospitals face ongoing challenges in recruiting qualified nursing and sterile processing staff. Assigning these highly trained professionals to tasks that do not utilize their specialized skills not only undermines job satisfaction but also weakens overall operations. Supply chain leaders can make a compelling case for consolidating such services under a single umbrella of hospital operations. Leveraging a third-party partner can provide a stable foundation for these processes and enable meaningful change. Demonstrating the time and effort required for these tasks is the cornerstone of a clear business case.

Consolidating non-nursing tasks not only frees significant patient care time for nursing teams, but also establishes consistent processes, clear accountability, and a foundation for continuous improvement with measurable results.

Canon Business Process Services has a proven track record of running efficient and effective supply operations. Extending this expertise to include related services, such as stocking bedside carts and managing medical pumps and equipment, can make these tasks seamless for clinical or surgical staff, who no longer need to divert their attention. Similarly, materials management staff who already replenish procedural supply areas are well positioned to pick surgical cases, freeing up certified sterile processing technicians to focus on set and instrumentation turnover. Contact us today to learn more about Canon Medical Supplies Distribution and Logistics solutions.

* McKinsey & Company. Reimagining the nursing workload: Finding time to close the workforce gap. May 2023. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare/our-insights/reimagining-the-nursing-workload-finding-time-to-close-the-workforce-gap