Gartner Says AI Will Soon Make Hospital Inventory Counting Obsolete

Chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) of healthcare organizations should prepare to replace manual inventory counting with supply rooms that use AI and computer vision to track supplies and trigger replenishment, according to Gartner, Inc., a business and technology insights company.

Advances in AI, computer vision and workflow automation are making it increasingly feasible for healthcare supply rooms to sense inventory conditions, predict demand and initiate replenishment with minimal human involvement.

“Hospitals have spent years buying technology that helps employees count supplies, but employees are still doing the counting,” said Bruce Gilmore, VP Analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice. “AI and computer vision create an opportunity to remove that work, rather than make it incrementally faster. This can enable nurses to spend more time with patients, rather than searching for missing items in stockrooms.”

Gartner research points to a number of benefits to implementing autonomous supply rooms, including providing administrators with a real-time view of available supplies and enabling the management of a wider range of growing products at scale. Additionally, autonomous periodic automatic replenishment (PAR) rooms can help directly address four ongoing challenges facing healthcare providers today (see Figure 1). 

CSCOs of health systems that continue relying on labor-intensive approaches will face increasing difficulty scaling operations and achieving real-time visibility across thousands of inventory locations.

In an autonomous supply room, cameras continuously track available supplies. AI analyzes usage and anticipated demand, then prompts or initiates replenishment. Voice instructions and illuminated bins or electronic shelf labels can also guide clinicians to the items they need.

Operationalizing inventory autonomy will require health system CSCOs to distinguish between technologies that merely automate and those that enable true inventory autonomy. Bar code systems, RFID infrastructure, smart cabinets, weighted bins and other established technologies can improve individual tasks while reinforcing an operating model in which staff remain responsible for counting, scanning and monitoring inventory.

Gartner recommends that healthcare organizations avoid allowing prior investments to dictate future strategy and evaluate technologies according to how much manual work they eliminate, their long-term operating costs and their ability to scale inventory autonomy across clinical inventory locations.

“CSCOs should evaluate new technology investments in this area by the work they remove,” said Gilmore. “The relevant measures are whether supply chain employees spend less time counting, clinicians find supplies faster, fewer products expire and shortages occur less often.”