Health systems are adopting a range of strategies to strengthen collaboration between clinical and supply chain teams, such as implementing formal governance structures, data-driven disruption monitoring and integrated communication workflows to help maintain patient care amid supply challenges.
Here are responses from 13 supply chain leaders who were asked: How is your health system enhancing collaboration and communication between supply chain and clinical teams to improve visibility and better manage disruptions?
Note: Responses have been lightly edited for style and clarity.
Janet Abbruzzese. Chief Supply Chain Officer at University of Michigan Health (Ann Arbor): Over the past several years, the volatility of healthcare supply chain has prompted us to be more innovative and courageous with processes, technology and transparency. As a clinically integrated supply chain, over the past year we have created or implemented several mechanisms to increase efficiency and productivity in the way we proactively monitor potential disruptions and then react to ensure that our clinical teams have what they need when they need it.
The first change is the placement of an inaugural medical director of supply chain. This role has proven to be invaluable for rapid peer to peer collaboration and influence. The second is the establishment of a statewide supply chain steering committee consisting of multidisciplinary leaders to include quality, finance, nursing, physicians, operations, sustainability and IT along with supply chain. This forum allows for escalation of supply risk and the ability to provide situational awareness and ability to nimbly problem solve even as a complex health system. Lastly, the data analytics to provide predictive modeling has matured to the point that dashboards of our critical items are posted on our internal website for clinical teams to access.
Steven Chyung. Chief Supply Chain and Procurement Executive at Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, Calif.): Kaiser Permanente is a leader in a clinically integrated supply chain where our physicians, nurses, and other clinicians make decisions on what technologies and products we should use for the best health outcomes. When disruptions occur, we employ this same integrated approach to ensure visibility and address any issues impacting the supply chain.
In partnership with our clinicians, we answer two critical questions: 1) What are the acceptable alternatives? and 2) What clinical practices need to change to use these alternatives? Our clinical leadership defines the change and supply chain implements. This partnership approach creates transparency and consistency, ensuring that we maintain the highest quality of care for our patients.
Joe Colonna. Chief of Supply Chain at Piedmont Healthcare (Atlanta): Our organization has clinical governance committee, These are organized by specialty and composed of clinical leaders from around the health system. Their primary focus is quality, safety, and working cohesively with the organization. The supply chain team leverages these committees to make sure we are making the right choices when it comes to medical device selection, and that it aligns with the quality and stewardship goals of the organization.
Jacqueline Epright. Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer at Yale New Haven (Conn.): Yale New Haven Health has strengthened our clinical value analysis team, with members embedded in most system safety committees. New disruptions and updates are announced and updated by our VA nurses at our system safety huddles attended by nursing and physician leaders. Our VA nurses work directly with our nursing educators to vet substitute products and develop a communication and education plan. Engagement with site nursing leadership on virtual meetings has built these collaborations into trusting relationships.
Our medical director, Dr. Margaret Rose, has facilitated direct communication with our physician end users by quickly identifying affected specialties, important SMEs, engaging our doctors in the solution, and enhancing communication via our clinical leadership. During our recent IV fluid crisis, she was tapped to lead our weekly system incidence management meetings for core leadership, collaborated with our clinical data teams to develop improved utilization tracking to anticipate demand, and worked with clinical groups to establish initiatives as systemwide endeavors.
Tim Franke. Chief Procurement Officer at Intermountain Health (Salt Lake City): As disruptions have become a regular part of health care supply chain, Intermountain is focused on proactively identifying risk and applying mitigation plans around the severity of that risk. This proactive risk framework requires extensive collaboration with various clinical and organization leaders to ensure a quick response when disruption happens. Clinical leader collaboration plays a critical role interpreting supply chain risk and applying it to impact on patient care. The transition from a dual or multi source contract strategy mindset to measuring risk on patient care has provided a more complete understanding of risk and allows for more effective mitigation plans. We have also prioritized simplification in our process to disruptions which led to clearly defining roles and team members, ensuring the committee is empowered to make decisions and embedding communications in process design.
George Godfrey. Chief Supply Chain Officer at Baptist Health South Florida (Coral Gables): At Baptist Health South Florida, we recognize that strong collaboration between supply chain and clinical teams is essential to ensuring operational excellence and high-quality patient care. To enhance visibility, we embed supply chain into the clinical decision-making process through structured initiatives such as continuous improvement committees — organized by service lines like orthopedics, pharmacy and imaging — that meet regularly to identify opportunities for improvement. We also collaborate closely on RFP management and value analysis to align product choices with clinical needs and financial goals, and we partner on supply cabinet optimization to ensure critical items are available at the point of care.
To effectively manage disruptions, we’ve also implemented a robust, automated back-order management system that supports real-time communication and agility. Surgical departments receive daily updates on product availability and substitutes, while critical shortages are automatically flagged and communicated to relevant leaders. We’ve built out a comprehensive process for managing recalls and product defects to minimize clinical impact. These tools and workflows, combined with our culture of structured collaboration, have helped create a more resilient, responsive supply chain that supports both clinical operations and patient safety.
Jake Limbert. System Director of Healthcare Supply Chain at UCSF Health (San Francisco): All of our initiatives function more efficiently when they’re clinician driven or, at the very least, clinician supported. This encompasses the gamut of supply chain’s footprint, from resiliency to sustainability to assurance, all of these require inceptive engagement from our clinical teams. Accurate and actionable data is foundational, but then the question becomes broadcasting and informing. Having a dyad partner can help us sift through our reams of data to ensure it’s presented in a cogent and compelling way is the second piece to this puzzle. Many clinicians have competing priorities, so clean, clear, crisp and actionable data and insights are crucial to move things forward from inception to implementation.
Marcy Maddox. Director of Clinical Supply Chain Operations at University of Missouri System (Columbia): At University of Missouri Health Care, we’ve built a strong culture of communication and collaboration with our clinical teams to manage supply disruptions effectively. Using structured tools like our tiered huddle system and the SBAR (Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation) framework, we ensure timely, two-way communication and shared decision-making. Trust and strong relationships — from front-line staff to vendor partners — allow us to respond quickly, evaluate alternatives and stay proactive in the face of supply challenges.
Milrose Mercado. Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Chief Procurement Officer at Hartford Healthcare (Connecticut): At Hartford HealthCare, we’ve taken a proactive and strategic approach to strengthening collaboration between our Supply Chain and clinical teams through a clinically integrated supply chain model. At the core is our Clinical Care Redesign (CCR) program, which is embedded system-wide and designed to align clinical protocols with supply chain decisions.
This model allows us to balance cost containment with clinical excellence. By integrating clinical protocols and supply decisions, we’ve improved outcomes, reduced variation, and increased value across the board.
We currently have 16 CCR teams driving 367 key initiatives, which have delivered over $72 million in cost savings this fiscal year. As a result, this has positively impacted patient care.
A key strength of this model is the active involvement of clinicians in product selection and substitution decisions, especially during supply disruptions. This has enabled us to respond quickly and confidently to shortages, mitigate cost increases, and maintain continuity of care without compromising quality.
At Hartford HealthCare, we have also implemented an inventory management system —not just for high-cost items, but across the OR, ambulatory, and procedural areas. This level of integration is rare and highlights the strength of our clinical-supply chain partnership.
This collaboration has helped us build trust, reduce waste, and ensure that our patients receive high quality, safe care, with the right products, at the right time.
Masai Sung. Senior Director of Supply Chain Support Services at Stanford (Calif.) Health Care: Stanford Medicine’s approach to enhancing collaboration and communication between supply chain, physicians and clinical teams is multifaceted and strategically designed to improve visibility, prevent disruptions — its impact to patient care, and effectively manage disruptions. Stanford has a dedicated Supply Chain Resiliency Program that is inclusive of a team that triages approximately 800 disruptions each month using data from its distributor and suppliers, and a third-party monitoring tool. The team assesses the severity of the disruption, factoring in elements such as the anticipated duration, usage rates, on-hand inventory, the criticality of the item and whether alternative sources are available. Daily standard work is established across the various disciplines within supply chain, which prevents a majority of the shortages from ever needing to be discussed. This is done through investments of tools that detect and provide early warnings and insights, creative sourcing strategies, supplier partnerships, pre-identified substitutes, automated workflows, and through the strategic warehousing strategy.
Held weekly, the resiliency team runs the Substitution Task Force meeting, which is an interdisciplinary group composed of clinical representatives from each of our hospital entities, from various service lines, infection prevention and nursing professional practice. The objective of this meeting is to provide transparent communication of the disruptions that may impact patient care, discuss utilization and prevention strategies as well as review clinically acceptable alternative substitutes. The aim is to find a viable solution and activate prevention as soon as possible. As clinically acceptable substitutes are approved, these are loaded into Stanford’s ERP system to increase visibility across the enterprise and allow for automation to run so when a product is not available from a distributor the system will auto default to the clinically approved alternative.
As part of our continuous improvement process, Stanford has implemented a periodic re-review process of the substitutes loaded in our system to ensure relevancy and availability. The work and process is agile, requires transparent, strong, and frequent communication, leading to a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility for patient care.
Mary Twomey, BSN, RN. Vice President of Clinical Value Analysis, and Tracy Burrell Hancock, Vice President of Facility Operations at RWJBarnabas Health (West Orange, N.J.): “At RWJBarnabas Health, our supply chain is embedded in all clinical meetings and collaboratives to address any supply concerns,” Ms. Twomey said. “We communicate supply disruptions in an SBAR format and explain to end users any information we have on the disruption as well as a time frame for when this disruption will end. We detail the information on the alternative product we will replace it with. Our clinical resource management team, composed of clinical subject matter experts from various clinical areas, also participate in our physician-led Integrated leadership groups and our enterprise-level value analysis team meetings. This fosters better communication when discussing supply chain opportunities to drive better value by standardization as well as reduction in care variation.”
“From the logistics arm of supply chain, we’ve taken a partnership approach in terms of managing communication and collaboration related to supply disruptions,” Ms. Burrell Hancock said. “Our winning strategy has been to round at least twice a day on all nursing units. This rounding includes dialoging with each department’s management team. It’s during these discussions that we share pertinent supply updates directly with the front-line staff. Our nursing unit supply rooms have communication boards, which we use to share supply updates. We also participate in the hospital daily safety briefings and leverage this forum to provide our C-Suite and nurses with supply updates.
Jae Yu. Senior Director of Supply Chain Operations at Tenet Healthcare (Dallas): We’re enhancing collaboration by streamlining processes, removing layers, clarifying decision rights and ultimately empowering and enabling key operators to take swift action. At the same time, we’re training both suppliers and key stakeholders on a standardized disruption response playbook to drive faster, more coordinated action.
