Just-in-time ordering, a single trusted vendor and a relentless focus on unit cost once formed the backbone of healthcare supply chain strategy. That equation began to crack under years of disruption, and supply chain executives are now rebuilding around resilience, smarter technology and a seat at the strategy table.
Becker’s asked supply chain leaders from hospitals, health systems and academic medical centers across the U.S. which once-core strategic assumption their team has fully let go of as that equation stopped holding up.
Every executive featured in this article will speak on panels at Becker’s Supply Chain Summit at the 14th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, taking place November 2-5, 2026, in Chicago. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear these and other health system leaders discuss the challenges shaping strategy for the year ahead, from shortages, AI integration and leadership in the workforce.
Registration is open now for the 14th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable. Register here to secure your spot and join the conversation with the executives featured below.
If you would like to join as a speaker or a reviewer, please contact Mariah Muhammad at mmuhammad@beckershealthcare.com or agendateam@beckershealthcare.com.
For more information on sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jessica Cole at jcole@beckershealthcare.com.
Question: What once-core strategic assumption has your team fully abandoned?
Scott Meiser. Vice President of Supply Chain at AHN Saint Vincent Hospital (Erie, Pa.): In short, we can or must touch every transaction that comes through the supply chain. Instead, we have adopted automation that allows us to only focus on the transactions that need our attention and allow the automations to handle what they can. We call it “seeing the trees for the forest.” Automation handles most of our price disputes, open PO follow-ups, essentially, all the high-volume transactions through operations. This allows the team to focus on critical transactions, like rush orders for procedural areas, and continued process automation and optimization. Most recently, we have moved beyond tasks to more complex workflows where AI is analyzing data and then triggering a next step, typically analysis we would do weekly or monthly, can now be done daily. For example, at our distribution center expiring product workflow, the agent is evaluating outliers, emailing an inventory analyst, and indicating that an expiration date is likely incorrect and the item needs to be inspected. (If only we had a robot to walk around the DC, they’d do that too!)
Dave Fergus. Chief Supply Chain Officer of OSF HealthCare (Peoria, Ill.): One strategic assumption I’ve fully abandoned is the belief that we need better data before we can act.
Earlier in my career, uncertainty made me ask for more analysis, another report, one more round of validation. What I’ve learned is that most health systems already have enough information to act. What they lack is the confidence, the accountability, and the operating process to turn that information into execution. I’ve joked more than once that I could save a health system millions of dollars by eliminating the work that produces interesting spreadsheets, dashboards, and presentations that no one acts on.
The supply chain version of this is painfully specific. We can usually tell you where price variance is sitting, which items are running off contract, and where we’re paying more than we already agreed to pay. Knowing it and recovering it are two different projects, and only one of them shows up in operating margin.
I’ve come to believe successful organizations run two paths in parallel. The first uses the data, evidence, and processes already in hand to build enough confidence to act in the physical world. The second identifies the gaps in our data and digital capability and closes them systematically over time. Too many organizations hold the first path hostage to the second.
The related thing I’ve changed my mind about is who does the acting. For years we treated the gap between insight and execution as a staffing problem, which meant it scaled with headcount and never actually closed. That work should be systematized, so the organization’s attention goes to the decisions that genuinely require human judgment. Execution creates value. Analytics should be the catalyst for it.
Latifah Jackson. Director of Supply Chain at University Health (San Antonio, Texas): One strategic assumption our team has fully abandoned is that sending an email means we’ve communicated.
In vendor engagement, we work with many small and locally owned businesses. These business owners are often on job sites, serving customers, managing employees, or running the day-to-day operations of their companies. Email may not always be the most effective way to reach them. We’ve had to become much more intentional about meeting people where they are, whether that means knocking on doors, leveraging social media, attending community events, or sometimes going back to an old school mailer.
That lesson has also changed how we communicate internally. It is easy to say, “I sent the email,” but sending a message and achieving communication are two very different things. Sometimes the fastest way to solve a problem, strengthen collaboration, or get an answer is to walk 15 steps down the hall and have a conversation.
It may sound like a simple strategic shift, but throughout my years in leadership, I’ve found that communication is often at the root of our biggest challenges. We’ve stopped measuring communication by whether the message was sent and started focusing on whether the message was actually received, understood, and acted upon.
Nick Cline. Director of Supply Chain Operations at Cedars-Sinai Health System (Los Angeles): For years, many healthcare organizations, including those where I worked, focused on reducing the quantities of supplies maintained in hospital warehouses and storerooms. Instead, we increasingly relied on distributors to deliver just-in-time orders in the lowest available unit of measure. We operated on the assumption that just-in-time inventory was the most efficient strategy. However, the major and persistent supply disruptions that began during the COVID-19 pandemic challenged that belief, demonstrating how quickly lean inventory models can create clinical and operational risk. We learned that maintaining the lowest possible inventory levels does not always reduce costs when shortages lead to emergency purchasing, product substitutions, delayed procedures, or increased staff workload. As a result, our teams shifted toward a more resilient approach that includes strategic safety stock, alternate suppliers, and greater visibility into potential disruptions. We now evaluate supply decisions based not only on price and efficiency, but also on reliability, continuity of care, and the risks associated with single-source dependence. Emerging AI tools may further strengthen this approach by helping us identify changes in demand, anticipate shortages, and respond earlier. We have not abandoned efficiency; rather, we have redefined it to include preparedness and the ability to continue serving patients during unexpected disruptions.
Omar Devlin. Executive Director of Supply Chain Planning and P2P at Stanford Medicine (Palo Alto, Calif.): We’ve fully abandoned the assumption that better systems automatically produce better performance. That if you pick the right ERP, contract platform, or analytics tool, the outcomes follow. Technology only amplifies the operating discipline that already exists, and in the supply chain that discipline rarely exists by default. So we stopped leading with implementations and started leading with governance: every program has a named owner, a defined objective, agreed metrics with a baseline and a target, and a weekly cadence that doesn’t move. That shift let us put 236 metrics under active management, with 71% at target and 70% trending in the right direction across a 13-program portfolio. We also let go of the idea that foundational work: item data, price accuracy, contract terms is a project that finishes; we treat it as shared infrastructure, because fixing price once improves procure-to-pay, charge capture and savings realization at the same time. The proof is in what moved after the discipline came first: Match exceptions fell from 73%, perfect order rate went from 84% to 96%, and item data health improved 94% from 540,000 open transactions to less than 15,000. This tells me the technology decision is rarely the hard one; deciding who owns the outcome is.
Dan Check. Senior Director of Supply Chain Core Lab at Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y.): One strategic assumption we’ve abandoned is that centralization always improves performance.
In healthcare, there is a natural tendency to centralize operations, inventory, decision-making, and support functions in pursuit of efficiency. While centralization can reduce costs and create consistency, we’ve learned that it can also increase risk. The more dependent an organization becomes on a single site, supplier, system, or workflow, the greater the impact when something goes wrong.
Over the past several years, we’ve become much more focused on resilience. We still look for opportunities to standardize and leverage scale, but we also ask how quickly we can recover from disruptions and whether we’ve created unnecessary points of failure. In many cases, some degree of redundancy is not inefficiency, it’s risk management.
The biggest lesson is that efficiency and resilience are not competing priorities. The strongest healthcare organizations are the ones that can achieve both: operating efficiently on good days while continuing to perform when conditions are less than ideal.
Janney Cheeran. Director of Finance and Analytics, Supply Chain Management at MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston): One of the assumptions that my organization has abandoned is that supply chain master data management is a static function.
In my current role, I have been championing the importance of quality supply chain data that is actively managed through strong data governance practices. This has never been more critical than it is in the current age of AI.
When you layer any technology whether it is predictive, AI enabled, or otherwise, on top of data that is unclean or misleading, it increases the risk of flawed decisions. Ensuring AI or predictive tools for supply chain sit on top of data that is trustworthy, governed and actively managed positions is not just a best practice, but a business imperative. This practice positions for successful decision making not only within supply chain, but across finance, operations, and every other vertical that depends on supply chain data downstream.
Michele Ebbers, MD. Supply Chain Medical Director of St. Luke’s Health System (Boise, Idaho): We used to assume that if the supply chain built strong enough relationships with physicians, alignment would follow. That was very individual dependent and we’ve pivoted from that. Relationships are how the work gets done, but they aren’t infallible: they don’t survive a leadership change, a supply disruption, or physician turnover. What has replaced that concept is structure: defined decision rights, written escalation paths, and physician champion expectations on paper. We now tell people what the process is rather than who to call to complain to. The benefit of this is that it makes the entire process, including dissension or mistakes, transparent and trackable. Influence gets you a decision once; structure gets you the same decision every time.
