Perioperative nurses are no strangers to a hectic workday. As critical members of a surgical team, they are responsible for a great deal of work prior to, during and after a patient procedure. This includes everything from setting up the operating room to assisting during the procedure and cleaning up afterwards.
Their preparation is a major part of any procedure. The right instruments and supplies must be selected from storage rooms, individually logged in hospital records and properly set up for the surgical team. Each item represents additional time during setup, which can compound across the multiple procedures conducted daily, and that’s time away from direct care with patients.
As facilities face mounting pressures to improve workflows and find cost savings, inefficiencies can seem particularly complex puzzles to solve. In an industry where time often equates to cost, driving product standardization and enhancing inventory management can help address these challenges.
Building efficiency through kitting
Cardinal Health™ Presource® Solutions is designed to support hospitals in pursuing operational efficiencies, easing burdens on busy providers. The business is staffed with clinicians and consultants who support clinicians with medical supply and surgical instrument kitting expertise. Through kits, also known as packs, Presource® Solutions helps create more efficient surgical workflows.
Presource® Solutions offers standard packs, with the core components needed for common surgical procedures, and custom packs, meticulously designed to meet providers’ specific needs and preferences. For example, a standard pack for a minimally-invasive laparoscopy contains all required supplies, including adhesive bandages, a table cover, surgical blade, needles and syringes, drapes and gowns, sponges and towels and more, bundled together, sterilized and ready for use. Custom packs allow for specific clinical preferences or needs that may be in addition to supplies found in a standard procedural pack.
An effectively designed kitting program means that nurses can grab one pack from inventory rather than pulling multiple items from various locations. This streamlined process can help simplify procedural setup and support supply consistency across procedures — which may help support clinician workflow and preparation.
“When clinical staff spend less time in the storage room and more time providing patient care, everyone wins,” said Joe Gilles, Global Vice President of Marketing, Presource® Solutions. “Facilities are able to take on more procedures and providers can better focus on the needs of their patients.”
Presource® Solutions clinical consultants work directly with hospitals and healthcare facilities to evaluate their supply needs across all patient procedures. Our consultants recommend the right mix of components based on procedural needs and ultimately establish a pack program that supports onsite efficiencies and helps streamline clinician workflows.
Because procedural needs are constantly evolving, pack programs should too. The Presource® Solutions team provides regular program pack reviews to reassess how components are being used and whether staff preferences and procedure volumes have changed. During these reviews, our consultants meet with clinicians either virtually or in-person and create or adjust packs, equipping clinicians with exactly what they need for each procedure. The team also eliminates non-value products to help reduce expenses and waste. Facilities can save an average of $25,000 annually from custom pack reviews alone, depending on the facility’s size, program and agreement.1
Pack reviews can also help support health systems’ sustainability goals. Our team uses data-driven tools to show providers greenhouse gas emissions in optimized kits, identify opportunities to eliminate packaging waste and reduce the number of unused items that would otherwise enter the waste stream. On average, Presource® Solutions custom packs can result in more than 2,000 pounds of waste reduction per hospital per year, according to our Fiscal 2025 Sustainable Business Report.
A closer look at clinical workflows
In some cases, a healthcare facility’s path to streamlined surgical preparation might be hampered by the facility itself. If its physical layout isn’t conducive to efficiency, that may negate the potential benefits from a pack program.
Our Presource® Solutions team includes logistical consulting to help determine how to best use available storage space. Primary logistics consultant Scott Wall, BA, BSN, MSN, works closely with clinical staff to review supply chain processes and efficiencies. Alongside our clinical and business consultants, Presource® Solutions logistics consulting can further enhance the benefits of a pack program by helping optimize storage and workflow processes.
“Space is a common problem throughout hospitals and surgery centers,” said Wall. “Many hospitals want to scale pack programs across more procedures, but they don’t know how to store them. We can help them use their facility properly and plan for growth in the future.”
Wall leverages deep expertise honed over decades of experience in surgical nursing and nursing administration, including service as a nurse in the Army National Guard and the Utah Air National Guard. He was first exposed to the power of logistics when working at a field hospital during a wartime deployment. This experience, as well as serving on humanitarian missions with the Utah Air National Guard, inspired him to specialize in healthcare logistics.
“Our goal is to bring the clinical and materials minds together, balancing the operational needs of the hospital with clinical imperatives,” said Wall. “When I approach a program review, I often think about the patient laying on the surgical table. I’ve been that patient — I want to do what I can to be sure they can receive the best care possible.”
Increasing efficiency at South Shore Hospital
To highlight the benefits of optimizing procedural supply management, Wall shared how he stepped in to support South Shore Hospital Center for Orthopedics, Spine and Sports Medicine in Hingham, Massachusetts, whose leaders had determined that existing inventory management practices weren’t keeping pace with increasing procedural needs.
According to Wall, South Shore converted an operating room into a storage room to address its lack of space for necessary supplies. Though this was intended to be temporary, the solution lasted longer than planned and limited the overall volume of surgical procedures the hospital could take on. Additionally, the operating room was located on the opposite side of the facility from other storage rooms, requiring clinical teams to walk all the way across the facility each time they needed to gather supplies for a procedure. This inefficient setup cut into time nurses could be spending with patients.
“Presource® Solutions pack programs are an efficient, effective way to deliver surgical products,” said Wall. “But if your storage setup isn’t optimized, you could still be wasting time during procedural prep.”
Ultimately, Wall recommended renovating the original storage space to create a better flow. The Presource® Solutions team collaborated with hospital stakeholders and an architecture group to help bring the renovation to life, crafted a revised pack program and worked closely with clinical staff to ensure the packs were stored effectively in the new layout.
The updates allowed South Shore’s clinical staff to gain back critical time in their day, strengthen their workflows and increase bandwidth for direct patient care. In addition, Kathryn Rogers, Manager, PeriOp Supply Chain, South Shore Hospital, estimates the team’s accuracy when picking supplies for each procedure has increased to over 95%.
“The layout and organization of the storage room provides ease in the ability to locate items for the clinical staff and case pick,” Rogers said. “It’s also decreased the time it takes to complete product ordering and put away surgical supplies and instruments.”
More than a simple renovation, the project represented a total transformation of how South Shore Hospital Center for Orthopedics, Spine, and Sports Medicine approaches surgical preparation.
“By streamlining through packs and smart logistics, we can support operational efficiency, room turnover and staff satisfaction,” said Wall. “We want to help your surgical staff be just as efficient outside the OR as they are in it.”
Editor’s note: For more than 40 years, Presource® Solutions has supported healthcare systems with inventory management and kitting solutions. Today, the business serves more than 4,000 healthcare customers across the U.S. You can learn more about the business here.
1: Cardinal Health data on file: Business & Clinical Optimization Metrics, June 1, 2026