The medical device industry is fiercely competitive and today's innovation often becomes tomorrow's commodity. In the constant quest for efficiency suppliers are often faced with stiff downward price pressures that lead to transactional relationships rather than strategic trusted partnerships. Marketing is charged with building the value proposition for customers but innovative options are hard to find. Creating a different relationship with the healthcare provider customer that goes beyond price and other types of short-term deals is the challenge that the suppliers must meet in order to succeed in a more competitive and resource-constrained environment.

Healthcare Suppliers are looking to establish collaborative, win-win relationships with their healthcare provider customers. These new relationships are anchored in shared information and responsibility. Data on actual usage of products that often takes months and large teams to collect is now available and updated as often as 20,000 times annually. The immediacy of this data provides an unprecedented level of intelligence about the distribution of medical devices. This in turn allows for a strategic change towards proactive customer care - making sure hospital customers always have the right level of inventory based on their actual usage patterns, partnering to provide solutions to other vexing problems like accurate clinical documentation at the point of use and ensuring patient safety is never compromised through item-level tracking of expiration, lot/serial and even clinical trial products.

WaveMark's solutions are designed to track inventory from inception to final use with shared visibility by all parties across enterprise boundaries. Marketing can use the WaveMark solutions to craft an improvement strategy for their customers. A typical WaveMark deployment involves:

• RFID tagging of medical devices in manufacturing to enable downstream detection of medical devices
• Efficient shipment, cycle-counts, and returns by distribution centers using RFID readers
• Proactive customer care based on website visibility to healthcare provider exceptions
• Sales and Marketing department leverage business value of deploying RFID readers and cabinet solutions with healthcare providers. In addition, Sales Management has online access to sales as they occur and can take immediate action on trends
• Marketing can rethink its packaging strategy with WaveMark's packaging expertise to leverage RFID and improved brand awareness on both the products and the WaveMark equipment
• Finance Department has access to up-to-the minute intelligence about inventory positions around the globe
• Regulatory Department has visibility to expiration exposure and can proactively have devices returned before they expire. Similarly, recalled products can be managed through the solution greatly reducing exposure and accuracy of recall events
• Field Sales staff are equipped with handheld RFID readers that connect wirelessly to cell phones allowing them to take accurate trunk stock cycle counts in minutes, transfer items to hospitals, conduct hospital cycle counts, and take orders based on clinical need and deltas between on-hand positions and established par values

To see more details on the equipment, click here