I worked for some people who sold educational supplies to school boards. Every year about 1-2 months before fiscal year end their was a big spike in orders for the same reason.
My last couple tours as a commissioned officer in the Navy before I retired were spent as a medical service corps officer and I took the time to get a graduate degree in health care administration. At one naval hospital (Groton, CT) I was the head of the supply department (I'm a graduate of a couple of Navy supply schools). At another, I was the director for administration. We found the exact same phenomenon as far as medical materiel and supplies went, believe me.
The way that government accounting and budgeting and appropriations worked, unfortunately, it was often easier to just go with the flow and buy whatever you could in order to ensure your command received a roughly similar, or even higher, medical materiel and supply budget level in the next fiscal year. In fact, a portion of my FITREP (report of officer fitness, which is a performance evaluation, essentially), would reflect my "obligation rate" as a medical supply officer, meaning I would be judged successful (or not) depending on the percentage of funds given to my command that I was able to obligate (i.e. "spend") in a fiscal year. My rate had to be at 98% or better.
Obligation rate can lead to problems, sometimes, such as when your higher headquarters (BUMED, or the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery) would suddenly throw $3 million or $4 million at you in the last week of August and tell you that you had until midnight on September 30th (the new fiscal year began October 1st) to spend it or lose it. You can imagine the spending/feeding frenzy that would occur, I'm sure. ;-)
They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot
big kahuna wrote:
len wrote:
One of our surgeons was doing an MBA and she noticed that there was a wide diversity of suture types being used by surgeons in the OR. So each operating room was being stocked with maybe five times as many suture types as needed. Some were used infrequently enough that they were being thrown out because they would expire. So she got everyone to agree and standardize and saved the system a fair bit of money. The article says such waste could be as much as 25 percent of health care spending but that sounds way too high.My last couple tours as a commissioned officer in the Navy before I retired were spent as a medical service corps officer and I took the time to get a graduate degree in health care administration. At one naval hospital (Groton, CT) I was the head of the supply department (I'm a graduate of a couple of Navy supply schools). At another, I was the director for administration. We found the exact same phenomenon as far as medical materiel and supplies went, believe me.
The way that government accounting and budgeting and appropriations worked, unfortunately, it was often easier to just go with the flow and buy whatever you could in order to ensure your command received a roughly similar, or even higher, medical materiel and supply budget level in the next fiscal year. In fact, a portion of my FITREP (report of officer fitness, which is a performance evaluation, essentially), would reflect my "obligation rate" as a medical supply officer, meaning I would be judged successful (or not) depending on the percentage of funds given to my command that I was able to obligate (i.e. "spend") in a fiscal year. My rate had to be at 98% or better.
Obligation rate can lead to problems, sometimes, such as when your higher headquarters (BUMED, or the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery) would suddenly throw $3 million or $4 million at you in the last week of August and tell you that you had until midnight on September 30th (the new fiscal year began October 1st) to spend it or lose it. You can imagine the spending/feeding frenzy that would occur, I'm sure. ;-)
They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot