Delivering Digitally-Enabled Supply Chain Value for our Patients

Healthcare supply chain professionals have witnessed a tremendous acceleration of risks, opportunities, and importance over the past three years. And that growth has been a 180-degree change from the materials management world many health systems had grown accustomed to, over the last century. 

While the COVID-19 pandemic stretched all of us supply chain professionals, and exposed vulnerabilities vertically and horizontally, it also brought us to a seat at the table in an industry whose primary mission is patient care – not moving or selling boxes. Many healthcare supply chains have leveraged that seat to open conversations about the overall value we bring to our organizations.

Those conversations reveal what many of us have known all along: Supply chain isn’t just about moving boxes. It is about inventory and product portfolio optimization, clinical integration into a structured sourcing and contracting process, decision support and operational excellence capabilities that can be leveraged into many other healthcare functions--and much more. Given the economic challenges healthcare and supply chain leaders face, along with the lightning speed of technological innovation and adoption pertinent to supply chain, I believe we all must engage the future through a new lens. A lens framed by virtual teams, using AI technologies, who collaborate with clinicians around total value, all while ensuring the patient is the clear focus of our vision. 

Supply chain is also about balance. How do you balance inventory and supplier performance to ensure patient care, while delivering cost savings across a diverse, global supply base with thousands of vendors and tens of thousands of items? 

At Cedars-Sinai our goal is to have our supply chain professionals execute and deliver on this balancing act every day. We are also deploying new technology platforms that streamline tactical execution and analytics. While new technology and analytics certainly drive efficiencies and consistency across our health system’s multiple locations, we also have found that they can also be transformative. 

Yes, the digital supply chain can be linked to enterprise resource planning systems, but a true transformation requires us to look at our underlying business processes and dramatically change them to truly evolve. Our supply chain and IT teams are partnered on this journey and we are finding new ways to define products, streamline ordering processes and further integrate our evolving health system.

Imagine a world where clinicians voice their request and the technology recognizes and translates “clinical speak” to what the back end systems can process. 

It then tells the clinician where the inventory is available on their floor or triggers a request to order the inventory internally or directly with the vendor. It sounds futuristic but we are already exploring this scenario through close collaboration with our clinicians and several of our incubator companies. 

What if all stocking locations could self-requisition supplies to remain well-stocked and that any additional inventory needed on an urgent basis is delivered by a robot? At the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, about 10% of our supplies are delivered by robots and we are looking at how to expand those capabilities to allow our care teams to focus on what they do best: taking care of our patients. 

Outside of the care environment, suppliers receive a regular update of consumption and automatically adjust their production plans to meet demand. While we are not yet able to share consumption data, we are already sharing demand forecasts enhanced by AI technology with key suppliers and the result is that we are seeing improved fill rates. 

The continued evolution of supply chain digitization allows our professionals to focus more on bringing value through more collaborative negotiations with suppliers. It also has resulted in deeper relationships with clinicians including having them participate in structured negotiations and applying supply chain methodologies to not only improve supply chain but overall clinical operations. For example, at Cedars-Sinai, we are leveraging some of our capacity planning and optimization skill sets to help improve overall hospital flow. 

The bottom line: We must realize that digital capabilities are already here today – maybe not fully vetted, maybe in pilot phase, but pieces are getting deployed. We are headed toward a value based, forward looking supply chain – one where the value we bring to the organization is not measured only by savings and supply availability, but also by how we engage and what other benefits we bring to the organization through our general skills and capabilities. How each of us leverages the future to truly add value will determine where our profession will go.