How CityCare Hospital Saved INR 32 Lakh Annually by Digitising Inventory Across 8 Departments

CityCare Multi-Specialty Hospital, a 200-bed facility in Anna Nagar, Chennai, had been operating for 15 years with a manual inventory system that had not evolved beyond paper registers and Excel sheets. The hospital's central store managed over 4,000 SKUs including medicines, surgical consumables, implants, disposables, and general supplies. Eight departments -- General Medicine, Surgery, Orthopaedics, Gynaecology, Paediatrics, ICU, OT, and the in-house pharmacy -- each maintained their own sub-stores with independent stock registers.

The problems were systemic. Department indent requests were submitted on paper forms, physically carried to the central store, where the store manager manually checked availability and processed issues. This indent cycle took 2-3 days on average, and during emergencies, departments bypassed the system entirely by purchasing directly from local vendors at premium prices. Emergency purchases accounted for 18% of total procurement -- nearly double the industry best practice of under 10%.

Expired stock was the most painful financial drain. Without automated expiry tracking, consumables with short shelf lives (surgical sutures, catheter sets, specific injection vials) regularly expired on department shelves. The annual write-off for expired stock was INR 45 lakh, primarily concentrated in the OT (INR 18 lakh), ICU (INR 12 lakh), and pharmacy (INR 15 lakh). Nobody had real-time visibility into what was expiring when.

The hospital management, led by Dr. Lakshmi Narayan (Medical Director), had attempted to implement a generic ERP system three years earlier. The project failed because the software was not designed for hospital inventory complexities -- it could not handle batch and expiry tracking, did not understand department sub-store workflows, and required extensive customisation that the vendor could not deliver.

GoMeds AI deployed Healthcare Inventory Software with a hospital-specific configuration that addressed CityCare's unique challenges. The implementation started with the central store and progressively expanded to all 8 department sub-stores over 10 weeks.

The central store was digitised first -- all 4,000 SKUs were catalogued with specifications, unit of measure, batch tracking requirements, and category classification (ABC analysis for value, VED analysis for criticality). Minimum, maximum, and reorder levels were set for the top 500 items based on 12 months of consumption data extracted from paper registers.

The department indent workflow was transformed. Instead of paper forms, department heads and nursing supervisors raised digital indents from their workstations or tablets. Indents were automatically checked against central store availability, routed through budget-based approval workflows, and issued with barcode scanning. The average indent processing time dropped from 2-3 days to 4 hours.

Expiry management was the most impactful change. Every item in the hospital was now tracked with batch and expiry information. The system generated daily reports of items expiring in the next 90, 60, and 30 days. For the OT, a FEFO (First Expiry First Out) protocol was enforced -- the system automatically recommended which batch to issue based on earliest expiry. Inter-department transfers were enabled for items approaching expiry that were needed in other departments.

For consumption tracking, GoMeds implemented patient-linked material issue for IPD patients. When a nurse issued supplies for a patient, the items were linked to the patient's admission record, and charges were automatically posted to the patient's bill. This eliminated the manual charge entry that previously missed 8-12% of consumable charges.