Supply Chain Enabled

Early Insights from Health Systems Survey

Published: February 23, 2021
Author: Keelin Rowan

Early Insights from Health Systems Survey

Since 2012, PerformanSC, in conjunction with Jamie Kowalski Consulting LLC, have published a series of reports on Health System supply chains, based on inputs from their supply chain leaders.    Due to the pandemic, we pushed the research phase of the 2020 report out to last November / December and we will publish the report in March 2020.
The survey takes inputs from supply chain leaders health systems in the US and Europe.   It provides insights into supply chain structure, benchmarks and metrics, technology, and in the 2020 survey we took the opportunity to get learnings from the pandemic on their supply chains.
Some of the highlights from the 2020 survey data includes:
Insights into supply chain partner performance:

    • Internal procurement and supply chain teams ended up picking up the slack for a lack of response from key existing supply chain partners – particularly in sourcing and managing PPE
      • 76% of respondents felt that government agencies responded poorly or very poorly
      • 53% of respondents felt that distributors responded poorly or very poorly
      • 41% of respondents felt that GPOs responded poorly or very poorly

Insights into internal supply chain performance:

      • Existing preparedness plans nationally and at a health system level, were insufficient to manage the scale of the pandemic requirements
      • Existing suppliers could not scale at the level required, and rapid identification and qualification of new sources of supply was required
      • Managing demand and allocation of critical products was manual in many cases, and became a process that needed action to protect valuable supplies and to make them available where most needed
      • The internal logistics processes to store and manage the rotation of critical inventories needed to scale in line with requirements.

Implications for future supply chain design

      • Re-evaluation of critical inventory holdings for emergency and pandemic supplies
      • Less reliance on single sources – distribution or manufacturers – for critical PPE items
      • Consideration of increased regional supplier development for critical items
      • Investment in systems and resources to make internal processes more robust – particularly forecast and product allocation processes
      • Reconsider internal supply chain capacity and scale required based on updated inventory buffers

The report is shared with each of the health system participants and we will host a webinar in the coming months to discuss the findings in more detail.,


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