10 articles

Supply Chain & Procurement

Materials management, vendor contracts, consumable tracking, and hospital stores.

Consumable Cost Per Bed Day: Measuring It and Reducing It

Consumable spend hides in a single line of the P&L and gets managed by squeezing purchase prices. Measuring it per bed day by ward and case mix shows where it actually goes, and usually finds more money than any negotiation will.

Devika Sundaram

Jul 9, 2026 · 11 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

Biomedical Waste Barcoding and Annual Return Records

Waste traceability fails at the same point in every hospital: bags counted at the ward, bags counted at the store, and no reconciliation between them. Here is how to run barcode-level tracking, daily reconciliation, and the return that depends on both.

Raghav Chitnis

Jun 25, 2026 · 10 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

Reorder Levels and Safety Stock When Lead Times Are Erratic

Setting minimum and maximum levels for hospital consumables when distributor lead times swing: how lead-time variability drives safety stock, why service levels should be weighted by criticality, and why one formula across the whole item master always fails.

Raghav Chitnis

Jun 11, 2026 · 11 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

Building a Vendor Performance Scorecard That Actually Bites

Fill rate, on-time-in-full, quality rejections, documentation compliance and responsiveness, measured from transactions you already capture. How to tie the scorecard to NABH's approved-vendor requirement and to a de-listing process that survives a challenge.

Raghav Chitnis

May 28, 2026 · 10 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

Total Cost of Ownership for High-Value Medical Equipment

A capital business case template that goes beyond the quoted price: installation and site readiness, power and UPS, consumables, service contracts, operator staffing, downtime cost and utilisation. All figures shown are illustrative structure, not benchmarks.

Nitin Vaidya

May 14, 2026 · 11 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

GST Input Tax Credit and How It Reshapes Hospital Buying

Healthcare services are exempt, so most hospital input tax credit is blocked or reversed. Here is how proportionate reversal works, why it makes GST a real cost line, and how that changes buy versus lease, AMC structuring and pharmacy design.

Raghav Chitnis

Apr 30, 2026 · 11 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

Configuring Hospital Billing for NPPA Ceiling Price Rules

A billing-system view of drug price control: keeping the controlled-item list current, separate line items for stents and implants, brand and batch on the estimate and final bill, and the documents a state drug controller inspection actually asks to see.

Devika Sundaram

Apr 16, 2026 · 10 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

Implant Traceability Under the Medical Device Rules 2017

What a hospital must capture and retain when a device is implanted: UDI-DI and UDI-PI concepts, the obligations flowing from the Medical Device Rules 2017, the point-of-implant record, and how to run a recall traceback before a recall arrives.

Nitin Vaidya

Apr 2, 2026 · 11 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

Rate Contract vs Tender vs Direct Purchase: A Route Policy

Not every hospital item deserves the same procurement route. This compares rate contracts, open tenders, limited tenders and direct purchase by shelf life, criticality, value band and urgency, and shows how to write the policy that assigns each item class a route.

Devika Sundaram

Mar 19, 2026 · 11 min read

Supply Chain & Procurement

GeM Procurement for Hospital Medicines and Consumables

How to run medicine and consumable bids on the Government e Marketplace: category and specification design, why seller participation collapses on clinical items, the technical rejection causes you control, and when GeM is the wrong route entirely.

Devika Sundaram

Mar 5, 2026 · 11 min read