The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response should enhance the management of the nation's Strategic National Stockpile, a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine suggests.
The report examines causes of medical supply shortages and identifies ways to enhance resilience during public health emergencies as well as in times that are less dire.
Seven recommendations to increase the resilience of medical supply chains:
1. Publicly provide information on sourcing, quality, volume and capacity for medical products approved or cleared for sale in the U.S.
2. Establish a public database for supply chain information for medical products.
3. Incorporate quality and reliability, in addition to price, in contracting, purchasing and inventory decisions.
4. Modernize and optimize inventory stockpiling management to respond to shortages at national and regional levels.
5. Create capacity buffering for critical medical products where such capacity is a cost-effective complement to stockpiling.
6. Negotiate an international treaty with other major medical supply exporters that rules out export bans on key components of global supply chains.
7. Establish a working group to examine issues regarding medical supply chains.
Read the full report here.