If you’re an operations director at a medical center managing inventory across multi-location sites, and the supply numbers aren’t adding up, this one’s for you.
Medical supply loss doesn’t always announce itself. It builds quietly, over weeks and months, until you pull the data across your sites and realize you’ve been funding a problem you can’t explain. Most healthcare operations leaders eventually land on one critical realization: they need outside help to fix it.
Dear Dangerously in Love with Finance,
I oversee operations at a medical center with three locations, and I’m watching money disappear.
We’ve been dealing with medical supply loss for months. A case of exam gloves short here, a vendor delivery of wound care supplies that doesn’t match the purchase order there. No single incident big enough to trigger an alarm, but when I pulled the shrinkage numbers across all three clinic sites last quarter, the total added up to something I couldn’t ignore.
I can see it in the budget variances. I can see it in the reorder costs. Three locations replacing supplies that should already be stocked in our exam rooms, and I can’t trace where they went. I brought it to leadership and they said, “Fix it.” No playbook. No resource. Just “fix it.”
So I tried. I separated who could place supply orders from who could receive them at the dock. I required sign-offs on deliveries. I put documentation and inventory tracking steps in place because we had nothing. One person could order medical supplies, receive the shipment, and confirm the delivery without a second set of eyes on any of it. I knew it was a problem. I just didn’t know how to build the fix the right way.
I’m not an internal controls expert. I’m an operations director who keeps three clinics running. I’ve Googled “medical inventory management controls” and exact phrases like “separation of duties medical practice.” I’ve read articles on inventory loss prevention for healthcare facilities. But I’m figuring it out as I go. And every week I spend figuring it out is another week I’m placing reorders for supplies we already paid for.
Where do I even start?
Regards,
— Watching the Numbers and Running Out of Answers
Dear Watching the Numbers,
You are dealing with a multi-site financial controls problem, and you don’t have the right person working on it.
Supplies disappearing across three locations with no documentation trail and one person touching the entire procurement cycle from order to delivery confirmation. That’s financial exposure. Your supply costs are already high, your teams are already stretched, and every reorder for product that should be on the shelf is money you’re pulling from somewhere else in the budget. This is showing up in your budget, not just your supply closet.
What you need is a financial professional who builds inventory management and supply chain controls for healthcare operations. Someone who can walk your three clinic locations and see how medical supplies move from purchase order to storage room to exam room. Someone who can design separation of duties around your staffing levels, your vendor relationships, and how deliveries actually come in at each site. You can see the problem. You don’t have the training to fix it without breaking your workflow. Those are two different jobs. Do yours, and hire someone to do the other one.
You can see the problem. But stop tinkering with inventory management systems you don’t fully understand. You don’t have the training to fix it without breaking your workflow. Those are two different jobs. Do yours, and hire someone to do the other one.
Do the math: whatever you’d spend bringing in that person is less than what you’re already losing to shrinkage and reorders every quarter. You have the numbers. You’ve seen them.
Stop Googling. Get the right person in the room.
Lots of Love, Coffee and Chocolate,
Dangerously in Love with Finance and the HBoF Family
Is Poor Medical Inventory Management Quietly Draining Your Practice?
Operations directors at medical centers and medical practices deal with supply loss every day. Most of them are trying to solve it without the financial controls expertise the problem requires.
A fractional CFO with internal controls experience in healthcare can assess your procurement process and implement separation of duties that fit your clinical teams. They can build documentation systems that track every supply order from request to receipt across all your locations. That’s how you stop paying for the same supplies twice.
If your medical supply numbers aren’t adding up across your locations, let’s talk.
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