Premier and Resilinc said Oct. 26 they have partnered to boost visibility into the healthcare supply chain and help health systems avoid disruptions to their supply chain.
Resilinc, a supply chain management software company, offers a cloud platform that connects customers and suppliers. Bindiya Vakil, CEO of the company, told the Charlotte Business Journal that the platform is "the LinkedIn of supply chain."
The partnership gives Premier, a group purchasing organization that works with more than 4,400 hospitals and health systems in the U.S., access to mapping services for more than 1,300 suppliers and 15,000 sites, the companies said in a news release. Resilinc's mapping services tracks manufacturing sites, their suppliers and inventory levels and looks for disruptive events that could affect supply chains, according to the Charlotte Business Journal.
Supply chain disruptions spiked 67 percent in 2020, Premier said in the news release.
"COVID-19 highlighted the lack of downstream supply chain visibility and reinforced the urgent need to better understand product availability and risk as providers have struggled to access vital healthcare products and medications," the company said.
The partnership gives Premier visibility down to the site, product and ingredient/part levels for its top supplier partners, which allows for greater transparency into potential vulnerabilities in the supply chain.
"It gives you the next level of visibility into ... the supplier's supply chain, so that we can now add a new dimension that says, 'Look, we know the product they make, we know they're FDA-approved, we know that they are in a good financial standing, we know that they're not in trouble with any agencies,' all of the vetting that we normally do, and now let's take a deeper look into their operations," David Hargraves, senior vice president of supply chain at Premier, told the Charlotte Business Journal.
The financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
Read the full news release here.