Healthcare supply chain leaders are feeling pressure as navigating challenges like cost containment, supply chain fragility and contract compliance become more critical to organizational survival. To address these challenges, many hospitals and health systems are investing in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modernization and interoperability.
While these technologies are vital for operational efficiency, organizations also need connected intelligence across their supply chains to proactively address exceptions and disruptions with trading partners.
To learn how organizations are tackling these challenges, Becker’s Healthcare recently spoke with GHX’s Chief Strategy Officer, Chris Luoma and Vice President of product management, Marlin Doner, about how hospitals and health systems can build more resilient supply chains.
Major supply chain challenges
Resolving supply chain issues is costly because disconnected systems, fragmented data and manual processes can create what GHX refers to as “workflow debt” for supply chain teams. The result of workflow debt looks like approval bottlenecks, cross-organization handoffs, fragmented decision-making, disconnected workflows and manual coordination.
Workflow debt can result in rework, exception chasing, manual reconciliation and continual coordination to keep the system moving. And teams across the industry are carrying too much manual work created by disconnected systems, fragmented data and processes not designed for today’s pace of care.
Beyond workflow debt, supply chain exceptions and disruptions represent a significant financial drag for healthcare organizations. Often, organizations remain siloed and try to solve these issues on their own, which is costly and resource-intensive, without exploring interconnectivity.
Mr. Luoma explained how a GHX customer recently analyzed the financial impact of addressing exceptions and disruptions on its own. “The large provider organization found that it cost around 1.5% of its overall annual supply chain costs to deal with these issues. It’s not immaterial,” he shared.
Even with adoption of technologies like ERP cloud technologies and various software applications, healthcare supply chains have often lagged behind in their ability to connect disparate systems and gain insight into potential disruptions. “Just implementing a new technology does not solve all of your woes,” Mr. Luoma said. “It really takes a complete process redesign and thinking about the end-to-end flow and outcomes you want to achieve. Providers are still on that journey.”
“Resolving disruptions is highly dependent on trading partners coming to the table,” said Mr. Doner. “Organizations need a platform approach that provides two-sided visibility where partners have a shared understanding of the issues and how to take appropriate action. Upgrading an ERP alone can’t solve for this.”
The same principles are also true for improving supply chain resilience, as providers and suppliers cannot become resilient in isolation. Resilience must be built across a connected ecosystem, with visibility, intelligence and action flowing in both directions.
The solution: Connected intelligence
Connected intelligence is key to cultivating a resilient healthcare supply chain. Connected intelligence unifies contracts, inventory, ERP and payment signals — giving organizations the ability to see the supply chain as one connected system and turning fragmented data into coordinated operational guidance.
According to Mr. Luoma, one of the most important elements of connected intelligence is the ability to proactively identify where and when issues may emerge, which is done by sourcing signals from across the supply network.
“To proactively see problems, you must mine all of these kinds of moments across supply chains, bring the signals and information together and create intelligence to focus your work,” Mr. Luoma said.
When bringing signals together, Mr. Luoma observed that not all signals and potential disruptions are the same. For example, the impact of a product shortage on a large integrated delivery network with multiple warehouses will be different than the impact on a small, independent community hospital. There will also be different contractual relationships with manufacturers and distributors. When parties are connected, they can communicate about not only the signal but can also share intelligence about how best to respond to the situation.
“We look for those signals in near real time, working with suppliers and providers to help ensure the right corrective actions are taken,” Mr. Doner said. Supply chain signals are important for detecting both exceptions and disruptions.
The GHX trading partner network can provide a shared understanding of an issue. While some disruptions cannot be fully anticipated, connected intelligence enables trading partners to detect earlier warning signals — including back-orders, recalls and product substitutions — and act proactively, often before an impact reaches the point of care.
In contrast, exceptions prohibit orders from processing due to data that is missing, incorrect or misaligned. “An exception results from a misaligned data point that may be critical for that transaction to flow in an automated way. It could be a part-number exception, a misaligned unit of measure, conversion factor or price — all of those things generate exception signals on our network,” Mr. Doner said.
By having parties use the same data, GHX can provide trading partners with advance signals that indicate where intervention or reconciliation is needed. These signals alert supply chain participants and help enable them to take appropriate action to resolve problems.
That shared intelligence is the foundation for agentic orchestration — the next layer of the GHX platform, which aims to translate those signals into coordinated action across organizations, systems and trading partners. Mr. Luoma described orchestration as “end-to-end workflow that delivers the business outcomes the industry and customers need.” Orchestration capabilities could include price reconciliation, autonomous sourcing and potential product substitutions, and inventory optimization — all designed to reduce the workflow debt that accumulates when those actions are handled manually.
An example of a use case that benefits from coordination and orchestration is pricing alignment — to help purchasers buy the right item at the right price from the right source for the proper care location.
AI orchestration
Agentic orchestration, built on connected intelligence, connects the dots to automate parts of the supply chain workflow, reduce workflow debt, improve perfect order rates and enable proactive supply chain interventions.
GHX applies AI at the transaction level to support touchless “invoice smoothing” to help remove friction between industry partners in the invoice process. This functionality works to automatically resolve discrepancies between invoices and purchase orders and reduce manual intervention. Today, the company smooths 75 to 80 million invoices a year – removing a significant amount of workflow debt for trading partners.
GHX has also deployed tools powered by generative AI to increase the number of touchless transactions and perfect orders for clients. “In the last year, we’ve seen over 70% of accounts improve their perfect order rate,” Mr. Luoma said. “That’s tens of thousands of hours eliminated because they no longer have to manage exceptions, and it translates into real dollars.”
Users can also query GHX to identify the greatest opportunities for improving perfect order rates, which trading partners are problematic and what actions should be taken. Today, GHX operates a human-in-the-loop model — presenting recommendations that supply chain teams can act on quickly — as the industry builds trust in AI-generated guidance and the underlying data that powers it.
Looking ahead, GHX’s roadmap moves across three horizons: advanced analytics that surface patterns across the network, generative AI that interprets those patterns to recommend improved actions, and fully agentic workflows that execute those actions autonomously without manual intervention.
As modern ERP platforms on each end of the transaction mature, GHX sees its role as the network-level orchestration layer that connects them — coordinating decisions and actions across organizations, not just between systems. The result is a supply chain that can continuously sense signals, decide on the right response, act across the network and learn from each outcome — to reduce workflow debt at the ecosystem level rather than one transaction at a time.
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