As the healthcare supply chain continues to bounce back from COVID-19 disruptions, leaders are monitoring geopolitical concerns, inflation, artificial intelligence and cybersecurity dangers.
These factors, along with sustainability and clinical integration, are top of mind for health system supply teams.
Here is what five hospital supply experts recently told Becker's:
1. Steven Chyung. Senior Vice President and Chief Supply Chain and Procurement Officer of Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, Calif.): We're going to be in an inflationary environment for the foreseeable future. We really enhanced our ability on how we measure it. We'll develop market baskets across everything that we buy; and on all the supplies, we'll look at what we are buying now versus what we bought a year ago and measure what sort of inflation we're experiencing. Then, [we] measure that against whatever industry benchmarks we can find.
2. Tinglong Dai, PhD. Professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore): The Chinese balloon incident is the canary in the coal mine for the U.S. healthcare industry. Our hyper-globalized supply chains leave us vulnerable to any geopolitical hiccup. It's time for healthcare executives to take a hard look at their supply chains and invest in reshoring, nearshoring and friendshoring to build a more diversified and secure system. A resilient supply chain is the cornerstone of a strong healthcare system, and neglecting it is like leaving the foundation of a building unsecured — it may seem stable for a while, but a surprise disruption could bring the whole structure crashing down. Let's not wait for the next surprise to take action.
3. Motz Feinberg. Vice President and Chief Supply Officer at Cedars-Sinai (Los Angeles): Hospital supply chains in 50 years will be much more integrated, both internally and externally, and will leverage automation well beyond what we see today. At Cedars-Sinai, we envision fully automated ordering and replenishment for supplies across all departments. We also are exploring the potential of AI-driven clinical interpretations to help us more quickly respond to supply needs. For example, procedure-specific supplies and custom pack needs would be forecasted and staged for the case well ahead of time.
4. John Riggi. National Adviser for Cybersecurity and Risk at the American Hospital Association: The bad guys are continuously evolving their tactics. So unlike a hurricane or tornado, bad guys change as we change. We implement a measure, they implement a countermeasure. So it's an evolving fight that we have to be fully engaged with our emergency management partners on.
5. Mike Schiller. Senior Director of Supply Chain at the American Hospital Association's Association for Healthcare Resource and Materials Management: I think hospitals have always been well prepared. [COVID-19] opened our eyes to some things that we do need to do from just a basic supply chain standpoint. Hospitals are now maintaining inventory reserves of PPE items, [and] hospitals are engaging in a risk stratification.