Health system supply chain leaders say the barriers standing in the way of better disruption planning all lead back to the same place: upstream, where they have the least control and the least information.
Les Feka, director of supply chain at Birmingham, Ala.-based Baptist Health Princeton Hospital, said the single barrier to planning is the lack of transparency with manufacturers and distributors around supply availability, which leads to unforeseen allocations that derail planning efforts. He added that as hospitals consolidate purchasing to manage costs, they often undercut the diversification that would otherwise buffer them when disruptions hit.
Cindy Gueltzow, vice president of supply chain services at Louisville, Ky.-based Baptist Health, echoed Mr. Feka’s insights.
“If we had information about their raw material or inventory shortages, we could work together to identify ways to navigate the incidents,” she said. “Also, if we had definitive details of their distribution warehousing, we could be prepared when weather or conflicts create unexpected and uncontrollable shortages.”
Tracy Cleveland, vice president of supply chain at Munson Healthcare in Traverse City, Mich., and president of the Northern Michigan Supply Alliance, pointed to the same blind spot from a different angle. The provider side of the supply chain often lacks visibility into where manufacturing actually happens or where additional stock sits within the distribution network, he said, and in a major disruption, that gap pushes hospitals toward brokers and non-standard sourcing — and the price inflation that comes with it.
Michael Alfaro, director of materials management at Ventura, Calif.-based Community Memorial Healthcare, framed it as a structural mismatch. Supply chain teams are tasked with engineering resilient health systems but forced to work with fragmented data and no visibility into upstream global pipelines, he said, and too many suppliers still capitalize on disruptions rather than partnering on proactive risk management.
“Until the industry demands systemwide data fluidity over reactive maneuvering, true enterprise resilience will always remain out of reach,” he said.
Their frustration lines up with where the numbers stand. Active drug shortages climbed to 223 in the first quarter of 2026, the second consecutive quarterly increase, with roughly three-fourths of those shortages tracing back to 2022 or later — a sign the underlying manufacturing fragility hasn’t resolved even as the headline count has eased from its 2024 peak. Hospitals are also bracing for the cost side of that same fragility. An American Hospital Association 2026 Environmental Scan found 82% of healthcare executives expect supply costs to climb as much as 15% and nearly all anticipate procurement disruptions, with the U.S. importing more than $75 billion in medical devices and supplies in 2024 alone and China serving as the primary source for items like respirators, masks and gloves.
That import dependence has only drawn more regulatory attention this year. New Section 301 tariff investigations targeting dozens of sourcing economies could hit categories like anesthesia instruments, syringes, pulse oximeters and sterile drapes — about 69% of which are manufactured entirely overseas — deepening the exact allocation and pricing unpredictability Mr. Feka and Mr. Cleveland described.
Nevertheless, there is a consistent frustration: Hospitals can build sophisticated internal forecasting and substitution playbooks, but those tools only go so far when the upstream data they depend on — where products are made, where inventory actually sits, who else is buying it — remains largely invisible until a disruption is already underway.
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