February 22, 2024- After the challenges that healthcare has faced in the last few years, it’s more important than ever to prepare for the future. At IDN Insights West, sponsored by Allergan Aesthetics, John Bain, Director, Health Systems – Strategic Accounts at Umano Medical hosted a panel that included Justin Freed, VP of Adventist Health, Shireen Ahmad, Interim VP, SSRM Strategy and Finance at CommonSpirit Health, and Brittany Schumacker, National VP, Business Development at Premier Inc., to discuss the state of the health supply chain operations since the pandemic and their key supply chain initiatives going into 2024.
John Bain: How is your supply chain operation different since the pandemic?
Shireen Ahmad: There are many events in addition to the pandemic that have influenced or have impacted CommonSpirit’s supply chain over the last few years. Throughout 2019 and early 2020, one of the biggest challenges we faced was the merger. We were actively transitioning GPOs at the onset of the pandemic. It was a bit of a shock, when in March of 2020, we were sitting in a room trying to figure out how we were going to convert to one GPO and in the next week, the pandemic shut down the country and we had to scramble to procure PPE to support our 145 hospitals and staff.
At the time, we had two strategic partnerships with distributors that we’ve maintained since. In part of the partnerships with both, we were probably one of the few IDNs with a steady supply of PPE for our physicians.
Read More in the latest issue of The Journal of Healthcare Contracting.