Hospital supply chain leaders say the next evolution of the field will depend less on purchasing tactics and more on transparency, integration and better visibility into how resources are actually used.
Across health systems, leaders point to three priorities: understanding the true cost of care delivery, building deeper partnerships with suppliers and creating real-time visibility into supply utilization.
For Colin Baird, systems director of supply chain management at Robbinsdale, Minn.-based North Memorial Health, the biggest shift would be how hospitals measure cost.
He argues that traditional hospital cost accounting systems often obscure where resources are truly being spent. Instead, he advocates for time-driven activity-based costing, which measures the time, labor and resources required for each activity across the supply chain.
By linking supply chain tasks to the time frames and resources required to complete them, health systems could gain a clearer picture of where inefficiencies occur and where operational changes could reduce waste and labor burden while protecting patient care.
Other leaders said the issue is less about measurement and more about the relationship between health systems and suppliers.
Michael Alfaro, director of materials management at Ventura, Calif.-based Community Memorial Healthcare, said hospital supply chains should move beyond a traditional purchasing model toward deeper collaboration with vendors. In his view, supply chains should function more like strategic partnerships built on shared performance metrics in which health systems and suppliers are held accountable to the same clinical and financial outcomes.
“Hospital supply chains must evolve from ‘buying’ to ‘partnering’ through radical transparency,” he said.
Technology integration is another area where leaders see opportunity.
Don Barton, CTO and director of supply chain management at Shelbyville, Ind.-based Major Health Partners, said the ideal future supply chain would function as a closed-loop ecosystem that connects hospital systems and vendor platforms.
In that model, real-time utilization tracking would allow organizations to see supply usage at the item and physician level, while predictive analytics could flag contract leakage, pricing drift and potential shortages before they disrupt care.
Seamless integration between enterprise resource planning systems, EMRs and vendor platforms could also help ensure alignment between contracted products, purchasing decisions and actual clinical use.
“This would give greater visibility into case costing, supply utilization at the SKU level and variation between surgeons’ supply utilization, cost and outcomes — both clinical and financial,” Mr. Barton said.
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