For years, supply chain teams treated shortages as one-off problems: spring into action, solve the problem, move on. That approach no longer holds in an environment where occasional shortages have become a steady state of disruption.
The disruptions are also harder to predict. During a Becker’s Healthcare advisory call, a strategic sourcing leader described a cyberattack on a major supplier that halted electronic purchase orders and held up her system’s orders. She also cited a separate incident in which a supplier cyberattack compromised surgical robotics and forced case cancellations.
A chief pharmacy officer in the Southeast described watching a major storm approach and realizing that all of her system’s IV solutions came from one local supplier.
The obvious fix, adding more suppliers, carries its own risks. More vendors mean more cost and complexity, and they can dilute the volume leverage that secures supply in the first place.
“Resilience has a cost, but so does downtime,” a clinical services leader from a New England health system said. “The challenge is quantifying both.”
This whitepaper shares how senior supply chain, pharmacy and clinical leaders are working through that trade-off.
Learnings include:
- What to ask suppliers about geographic diversification and manufacturing redundancy
- How one chief pharmacy officer’s team pairs aggressive standardization with stronger supply protections and allocations
- How to build “”intentional redundancy”” around the most essential medications
- Why early detection is about buying time to decide which shortages could become emergencies