Abbie: Welcome to today’s episode of BioSupply Trends Quarterly (BSTQ) Podcast. I am Abbie Cornett, the patient advocate for BSTQ magazine. This podcast brings together healthcare professionals, researchers, innovators and advocates to explore the scientific, clinical and operational trends shaping the future of biotherapeutics, healthcare delivery and public health.

In today’s episode, “Addressing Healthcare’s Hidden Challenge: Smarter Inventory Management with FFF Enterprises,” we’re taking a closer look at one of the most overlooked, yet absolutely essential parts of modern healthcare: inventory management. Behind every successful patient encounter is a chain of logistics, storage and coordination that ensures the right medication gets to the right patient at exactly the right time.

Our guest today, Jesper Oscar Jensen, plays a key role in advancing that mission. Jesper is part of the innovative team at FFF Enterprises where he works at the intersection of healthcare logistics, technology and workflow optimization. His focus on improving efficiency, reducing waste and strengthening provider support have made him a trusted voice in how smarter systems can improve both operational performance and patient care.

Abbie: Welcome and thank you for joining us. I’m your host, Abbie Cornett. Today we’re going to be talking about a new technology. People, when they think about healthcare innovation, they usually picture new treatments, medical devices or breakthrough therapies. However, behind every dose of medicine that reaches a patient is a less visible, but just as important component of care, and that’s inventory management. That’s getting the right medication to the right patient at the right time. And that requires precision, coordination and trust. Yet for many healthcare providers, managing inventory can be one of the most time-consuming and space-limited parts of their daily operations.

Today, we’re here to explore how smart inventory management can save time, reduce waste and ultimately allow providers to focus more on patient care. Joining me today is Jesper Oscar Jensen from FFF Enterprises. Jesper is here to discuss how new technology is transforming the way healthcare organizations approach inventory management. Jesper, thank you so much for being here today.

Before we get into the technology, can you share a little bit about your background and your role at FFF Enterprises? And what led you to focus in on healthcare logistics and innovation?

Jesper: Sure. So early in my career, I was blessed with the opportunity to work in a lot of different industries in around 13 countries around the world. I worked in telecom, fast-moving consumer goods for coffee, chocolate and Coca-Cola, as well as a beer company or two. I also worked in banking, shipping and healthcare. And I had a choice to kind of pick which industry that I wanted to focus on.

At the time for me, healthcare was going quickly. And I thought it was a great industry where I could do good, make a difference and help people while making a good living. So, ultimately, I chose to work for pharma and biotech for about 20 years. It was really rewarding. I learned a lot. I got to work with some great people. And then I had the offer to lead a small startup in the logistics and innovation side. And that proved to be a great learning experience and ultimately led me to FFF, where I now run our RightNow Inventory group. I have about 40 people who work to forward deploying inventory into our customer sites, do some technological solutions and ultimately get these products to the patients who need them.

Abbie: You have a  very interesting background. I particularly like the fact that you worked in chocolate. That’s intriguing. One of my favorite food groups. For those outside of healthcare, inventory may not seem like a really big issue, but it can seriously impact patient care. What are some of the biggest challenges hospitals and infusion centers face when managing inventory? How do those issues like limited storage or expiration of medication affect staff and patients?

Jesper: Yeah, that’s a great question, Abbie. So firstly, stockouts and giving patients the wrong medicine can cost lives. So it’s super important. So hospitals, infusion centers and other points of care, they respond to that by frequent counting, rotating their inventory, creating inventory tracking, EHR systems — and that drives system costs and labor costs. They also, others, they’ll add a whole lot of inventory. If they only nearly need five, they’re going to have 20 or 30 just so that they can avoid running out. And that drives a lot of expenses around carrying that cost. And ultimately, if you have it for too long, it can expire. So up to four percent or more of the products that we deal with expire at the customer’s hub. And that’s a real expensive thing to do. So I mentioned labor. I mentioned expiring a product. But there’s also even just all the equipment that they involve in that. So there’s temperature, managing storage, tools that they use around that, and just a big system that’s put in place to help them manage that.

Abbie: Inventory management and healthcare, it sounds like it’s really complex when you’re talking about expiration dates and having products in and out of storage, especially with temperature-sensitive products and limited storage space. What are some of the biggest challenges providers face today when managing their inventory, and how do those challenges ultimately impact patient care?

Jesper: Well, I think lost revenue and secondary costs from not having the right products on hand can be a major impact that every provider in every hospital institution wants to avoid. So lost revenue and patient harm, that’s the first most important thing. But then also labor is a major cost driver. So if you think about overall for hospitals and for the people that we work with, up to 30 percent of costs are labor costs. And that actually, if you have inefficient inventory practices that require you to count things repeatedly or spend lots of costs, that actually drives that up.

But after labor, your products are actually, for most of our customers, the second highest cost item that they have at the point of care. And their losses can add up really quickly. So if four percent of that 30 percent of your products expire every year, that’s a huge cost and a huge hit to the bottom line, which actually lowers how much care you can provide and potentially how many people you can help. So right now, inventory on average is also held between one and three months. So that drives cost if you think about just the investment and interest that you’re losing as a practice. And finally, the storage systems I mentioned before drive costs. So refrigerators, systems, electronic health records and other inventory management systems that can really drive costs for the practices.

Abbie: You know, that’s really interesting. You never really think about the cost of inventory and expiration. That’s fascinating. It seems clear that the traditional systems haven’t kept up with the pace of modern healthcare. What trends or feedback from providers encouraged you and FFF Enterprises to start developing a more intelligent and flexible inventory solution?

Jesper: Yeah, so first, it was more than 12 years ago that FFF entered into — this what we call forward-deployed inventory space. And later, we partnered with a company called Minibar to do a Minibar version for vaccines. But really what drove FFF’s entry and many companies’ entry is this concept of expensive and highly episodic medicines. So if they cost a lot and you don’t use them a lot, then suddenly you need a ton of them in a very short period of time.

And that can be really difficult to manage. So one year you might not need at all a snake bite antivenom, but another year you might need a lot of antivenom. You have someone come in and that actually is helping them solve that problem. Also, you think these customers have this product that they’re storing. Now they get this snake bite antivenom, they get a snake bite in. Suddenly they take the product, they use it and they treat that patient, but that patient needs repeat dosing. And actually their system is not built to immediately kind of respond to that and ship more product. And that’s also a challenge.

So when you have what I call episodic high-volume products, they need to immediately, the day of that use, trigger action that you get them to replenish and resupply. And that’s where we come in and can help. So by taking these solutions that we manage, inventory levels, tracking and counting, replenishment, and we even own the inventory so it doesn’t expire on their dime. We can help relocate it somewhere else to get used. This addresses a lot of these big issues and is major win-win for our customers.

Abbie: I know in the past that a lot of times healthcare centers didn’t carry some of those more expensive medications because they would expire before they ever used them. And that was a tremendous cost.

That brings us to RightNow Anywhere, which FFF Enterprises recently launched. Can you tell us what inspired this innovation and how it aims to help providers manage inventory more efficiently while maintaining a focus on patient care?

Jesper: Sure, so most systems right now that do forward deployment, they rely on either radio frequency identification, so these are small tabs, and kind of traditional radio frequency monitoring. And they typically only really work inside of a very closed cabinet or refrigerator, or somewhere with a lot of equipment surrounding it. And the distance that they work at is about four feet, so not far, if you will.

So to track products in a broad room, they need a lot of that equipment installed in many different places to kind of cover the whole room. And for example, with palletized inventory like albumin or something like that, they can’t actually penetrate deep enough into the pallet of product to track everything because it doesn’t go through things. Radio frequency doesn’t pass through things very effectively.

Abbie: I had not thought of that. That’s a good point.

Jesper: Yeah, so hospitals and these providers that deal with this, they have to change their workflow to allow specialized equipment into their office. And they have to know that, for this product, I’m going to go to this cabinet, and for my normal stuff, I’ll go somewhere else. And that makes them change what they’re doing.

Now, we’ve been doing this for 12 years. And for 12 years, these radio frequency systems, they’ve made minor evolution and minor improvements, but they really haven’t fundamentally changed. Meanwhile, in the last 12 years, if we think about how Bluetooth technology that we use in our phones and everywhere has been evolving rapidly and has now become kind of ubiquitous in our lives. And those changes making Bluetooth more cost effective and actually more effective. It has created this opportunity to use Bluetooth low energy, if you will, to track products with a simple reader. And they can track products with one reader through a large room around corners, in and out of refrigerators, even in pallets and complicated locations.

So it’s created this opportunity for us to simplify something that wasn’t even possible before and, therefore, allow customers to use their own refrigerators, their own workflows, without expensive systems to manage.

Abbie: And it saves space too, it sounds like.

Jesper: Yeah, for sure.

Abbie: Without getting too technical, how does RightNow Anywhere work behind the scenes? So how do technologies like the Bluetooth tracking and cloud connectivity help simplify the process and reduce errors and waste?

Jesper: Yeah, so I’ll start first with the technology itself. How does it work. Then we can go into how does that help. So at a simple level, we work with a Google spin-out company called Chorus Inc. And they provide to us the technology components that we use to deliver our product. I’ll just talk about three pieces in primary. There’s a little tag that we put on every single product that we’re tracking. And we put that on with a little sticker, if you will, that makes it very easy to go on there.

And Bluetooth, this is higher frequency compared to radio frequency. So it actually can communicate over longer distances around corners. It can bounce more effectively. So it allows us to get kind of that signal throughout the whole room. That signal then is picked up by a connected device, much like, you know, the cell phones that we all have, that’s somewhere in the room. And that device then picks that signal up and relays it either via a cell phone network or via Wi-Fi or ethernet to the cloud where we then take it. We get that message and that tells us, hey, this product is here. It tells us how strong the signal is. It tells us what temperature it’s being held at and some other important information that we use to say, hey, is this product being used? Is it still there, or is it in the recycling bin on its way out and being used for the patient? And based on that information, we know whether we should be shipping more product, should be replacing it, and how we take action to make sure that every patient gets the right product at the right time.

Abbie: So it’s like a real-time inventory system. You don’t have to go in and actually do the inventory. You have the data right there.

Jesper: Right, because no longer do the customers have to go into the account of their product because they can actually just log on to our system, and we can tell you exactly, based upon the tags that are still there, what product is still there. So it cuts down on the amount of time that they’re doing menial labor and can actually spend that time now on taking care of patients.

Abbie: Yeah, that’s amazing. You know, one of the unique things about RightNow Anywhere is it allows the providers to use their existing space. I mean, I kind of talked about that this technology has got to save room for refrigerators and shelves or cabinets that they’re currently having to use as part of their system. And why is that flexibility so important for healthcare facilities? And how does freeing up actual physical space translate into better efficiency and better patient care?

Jesper: Yeah, so pharmacies, if you think about it, are often that last link in the chain to be thought about in hospitals. Hospitals expand, they add more beds, they add more operating rooms and other facilities. And oftentimes, that pharmacy footprint stays the same. So they’re operating out of the same pharmacy, often in the basement or somewhere else that has not changed in the last 30 years. And they become space-constrained, but they’re doing even more product through there.

They’re also chronically understaffed. Pharmacists, they’re not that many of them, they’re not enough of them, just like many other roles. But, therefore, anything that makes them have to do things twice or add more menial labor takes time away from them delivering care to the patients that matter. With the current RFID systems that are in place in almost all the hospitals around the country, they also need to specialize the equipment. So now you’re putting in a custom cabinet or refrigerator or a shelving unit that allows a radio frequency ID to go through it. You’re putting that in and that’s taking space. Maybe it’s not optimally made for that space, maybe it’s not the right shape, and that costs space and time. And like we talked about before, now your workflow is different if you’re going to get a product from that cabinet versus somewhere else in your office. So by taking Anywhere, which allows you to literally store the product anywhere within your practice where you normally would, you can actually not change your workflow and not have to have the specialized equipment.

And therefore, you get these benefits of forward-deployed inventory where you get automatic replenishment, you get product there that we own and, therefore, you aren’t quite responsible for expiry and all these benefits without the needed space and the workflow changes.

Abbie: You’ve touched on quite a bit of what my next question is going to be, but let’s talk a little bit about what that looks like day to day with the technology changes for the pharmacist, nurse and administrators. And do you have any examples of where it can actually reduce stress or give staff more time to focus on patients instead of the paperwork involved in traditional inventory systems?

Jesper: Sure, I’ll just speak first to our RightNow Inventory program overall, which in the industry is one of the most successful programs out there. We have over $55 million in forward-deployed inventory at hundreds of sites around the country. And we’ve done over a dozen years of helping practices do better in hospitals, do better taking care of patients. And we really help them get that right product at the right time to the right patient — all while trying to remove the menial things like counting, expiry concerns and rotating things. And we get many notes from happy customers about how, hey, we got them a special product in very limited time to help them save a life. We were able to ship products from our warehouse in a high quantity after the initial dosing that they could do with the units on hand and make sure that they continued to take care of that patient. And that is what people in healthcare live for, is to make a difference in that patient’s life. So we get those notes all the time.

And sorry, I was just going to say, Anywhere, just launched now. So what it does is it really is an evolution of what we do. And it carries this greater promise to allow these forward-deployed offerings to come easier for the customer and do more things at more sites. So we’re really excited about this large new opportunity and how we can help more people.

Abbie: It’s really good to hear how it can take some of that stress off and allow the physicians and healthcare providers concentrate on the patient and not on the paperwork, you know, and the backside. That’s what we’re here for and what FFF is for is to provide that.

At the heart of this conversation is the patient. How does reliable forward-deployed inventory make a difference? Give me an example when a patient needs critical medication right away. I noticed you touched on snake bite antivenom earlier. That’s a really good example. But can you share some examples of how that improved access or how tracking has helped in a real-world setting?

Jesper: Sure, well we do see this every single day with our more than hundreds of units where people are taking these products out. So when you have an episodic treatment in a rarely used medicine, and we’ll use the example that we just talking about, the snake bite antivenom. We’re at the end of the snake bite season, but during the season, having antivenom on hand can matter hugely. You could order it once you have the patient there, but if you have it there sooner, it can help you save tissue and help you save a life. So, venom itself can kill tissue, and the sooner you get that antivenom in there, the more you can save. So you have people who’ve lost their calf or they can lose part of their leg even because that venom stays there for too long and you’re not able to actually get the antivenom in place. So by having that product there and then being able to ship additional product immediately once it’s used, it can make a big difference.

The second example, a very common one, is like blood factor products, right? So blood and factor products that can help stop or treat kind of these critical lifesaving bleeds. And we can also see those things immediately when they happen. Those are extremely expensive, but episodic in a way that you use a lot of it. Sometimes we use our entire warehouse full for one or two patients in a very, very short period of time. And being able to respond quickly, both from our warehouses, but also by these forward-deployed sites is huge.

We also have what we call our field transfer program, which is one more unique benefit for FFF. We have these hundreds of forward-deployed inventory locations around the country where we own these specialized medicines. And that means that if someone who’s maybe not even a customer of ours calls and says, can you get this product to us, which happens multiple times a month, in some small town somewhere, we often are going to have a site within an hour or two of that location that we can do what we call an emergency field transfer where we send out a courier who will pick that product up because we own it and move it to that patient who needs it in a different site. And it’s just an example of how FFF goes way out of our way to help healthcare care every day.

Abbie: You know, that’s amazing. I had researched the inventory issues for this, but I did not know that we had that program in place. That’s amazing. And you talked about factor products. I used to work with hemophilia patients, and I’m very aware that a bleed can eat through a whole lot of product really quickly.

Jesper: Absolutely.

Abbie: As healthcare continues to evolve, particularly with outpatient care and home infusions and smaller facilities, what do you see as the next step for inventory management technology? And how can systems like this continue to support providers and ensure patients receive that timely, high-quality care?

Jesper: Yeah. So if you think about the connected world that we all live in now, Anywhere’s solution leverages that and allows these pharmacies to automate and be able to get into a situation where they can help more people. We think RightNow Anywhere, because of the use of Bluetooth technology, is the first-of-its-kind solution in the marketplace. And we can offer now to our customers a way to solve the problem of forward-deployed inventory in a way that other competitors cannot.

And that should help us kind of capture more market share and help more sites do better — faster and sooner. So the other benefit of this is that we don’t need these expensive inventory tracking materials. We just actually have a simple cell phone-like device that we can actually install quicker and actually do so at a lower cost. And if you can do it at a lower cost, maybe the products that you can include in your system go down in terms of what the costs of those products are, where it makes sense.

So we can actually now go in with more products into the same place. But even further than that, now we can actually, in a helpful way, go into sites where maybe it wasn’t profitable or maybe it wasn’t possible for us to do it because the site was simply too small. So now we’re actually able to get into these sites that are quite small because of the low overhead cost of this system and be able to do even more sites around the country and help.

Abbie: You keep mentioning forward-deployed inventory. That was a term that I was familiar with, but it wasn’t from a healthcare standpoint in past. It’s fascinating that you’re using that inventory system for healthcare.

Jesper: Yeah, many of our customers will call it consignment. The difference for us between consignment is consignment is assigned to a single customer. And for us, forward-deployed is we’re deploying our inventory out at the customer site, which means that we can move it somewhere else. So it’s a little bit different than consigning inventory. But essentially, many of our customers will think of it as consignment.

Abbie: It just was fascinating from a business standpoint. I was looking at the model and I was like, OK, it’s a whole new paradigm for healthcare. Jesper, this has been such an insightful discussion. Before we wrap it up, what’s the one key takeaway you’d like healthcare professionals to remember about smart inventory management and how innovations like Right Now Anywhere can empower them to deliver better care?

Jesper: Yeah, so I think the very short elevator pitch, if someone were to ask me, is that Right Now Anywhere offers all those benefits of inventory consignment or forward-deployed inventory with no bulky equipment, no workflow changes required and super easy installation. So it’s everything that you’ve come to know and trust from us and from others in a long time and more. So that’s kind of the pitch, if you will, in a simple 30 seconds.

Abbie: This has been really interesting. I’m glad that we were able to have this discussion, and I can’t wait to see what the new developments will be. Jesper, again, I want to thank you for joining us and sharing your perspectives. And I want to thank everyone listening for spending time with us today. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other. Thanks.

Jesper: Thanks, Abbie.

Abbie: Thank you again for joining us for this episode of the BioSupply Trends Quarterly Podcast. For more information about this episode and related resources, visit us at www.BSTQuarterly.com. The BioSupply Trends Quarterly Podcast is a production of BSTQ magazine published by FFF Enterprises, bringing insight and expertise to the biopharmaceutical and healthcare community.

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