By R. Dana Barlow
Education, experience, exploration should not be mission impossible.
Nestled snugly, if not humidly, in mid-July means we’re in the middle of conference and trade show season with so many more choices to pursue until year’s end.
Unfortunately for many healthcare supply chain executives, leaders, managers and professionals, perusing the list of available conferences and trade shows to attend seems more like children thumbing through those old thick department store catalogs prior to the holidays, dog-earring plenty of pages in the toy section. [Note: Anyone younger than Generation X probably doesn’t recall those thick paper catalogues from former retail titans like Sears and Spiegel that rivalled the telephone book in terms of size.]
So many toys to choose and express hopeful interest even during the roiling economics of the 1960s and 1970s. With tamped family revenues struggling to cover higher expenses, many children would have to wait until next year for even a hint of something desired to show up in a brightly and festively wrapped box or two.
Adults in healthcare supply chain face a similar predicament. Companies stuff email boxes with so many invitations and marketing campaigns to attend this conference, that trade show. But with tamped provider organization revenues (think public and private payer reimbursements) struggling to cover higher expenses, coupled with labor challenges, C-suite leaders choose to cut travel budgets and keep staff grounded to handle crises and demands when (not if) they develop and emerge.
Honestly, battening the fiscal hatches for travel makes more sense these days with global geopolitical feuds driving costs up for just about everything – and that’s three years out from the pandemic. Digital/online alternatives that emerged during the COVID years, enabling people to attend shows “virtually,” certainly had the right intentions but never fully delivered on the rush to watch and hear what was happening versus touching products and interacting live and in person.
Healthcare pros, by and large, used pandemic-motivated travel restrictions to remain home, in the office or the hybrid home office. What made the experience more convenient and cost-efficient is that they didn’t have to worry about leaving a seminar or finding a corner in the exhibit hall to take an emergency phone call from work. Daily operations on-site simply distracted them from participating in virtual educational sessions or product demonstrations – even if they were running on their computers.
While conferences and trade shows (CATS) are designed for attendees (as in healthcare supply chain pros) to learn through continuing education, see and touch products in the exhibit hall and network with colleagues, competitors and peers to share experiences and advice with one another, too many feel they’re more like leisure and vacation time away from work – save for those in marketing and sales that have to occupy exhibit hall booths, make connections, set up future conversations to make deals and meet quotas. It’s business. That’s why the suppliers pay to be there and to fund the organizations hosting the CATS. One prominent healthcare supply chain leader colloquially refers to CATS as events where “you see old friends and collect new pens.”
Aside from that economic framework, two deeply ingrained fears simmer that also complicate the opportunity to travel to CATS and frustrate the suppliers paying for much of it: First, that the attendees may not be hearing or seeing anything new (or that they haven’t heard, seen or touched before) from educational sessions to products on display, and second, that the attendees may be locked into contract commitments that prevent them from making any decisions anyway, whether they are the product decision-maker or influencer at all.
Healthcare provider supply chain leaders need to bust through this stifling status quo and ignite their imagination.
It may be high time, if not past time, to invest in some serious reconnaissance.
Healthcare supply chain executives, leaders, managers and professionals must expand beyond the borders of healthcare CATS (without eliminating or ignoring them completely, of course) and investigate supply chain development and growth at CATS for manufacturing, retail and other industries. Yes, that prospect may seem counter intuitive. If you’re hard-pressed to attend healthcare-centric supply chain CATS, how do you justify attending supply chain CATS outside of healthcare?
It depends on your strategic argument, tactical convincing and utmost persuasion.
Ask the supply chain executives, leaders, managers and professionals – including sales and marketing – who work at the healthcare suppliers with whom you contract for products and services. You might be surprised to learn that they attend a plethora of annual and biannual CATS, including ASCM (Association for Supply Chain Management), American Supply Chain Summit, ISM World, LogiMAT, Manifest, MODEX, POMS (Production & Operations Management Society) and ProMat.
Granted, they’re wise to do this because healthcare suppliers also produce for and sell to the consumer market served by the retail industry. It might be tempting to counter the notion of attending a non-healthcare CAT by simply asking your supplier reps what’s hot, what’s not and what’s trendy. Second-hand information can be helpful, but not nearly as valuable as first-hand experience.
Attending these non-healthcare CATS will help you see that your counterparts work through some of the same challenges, losses and wins from which you can learn reliable lessons even though their financial modeling is starkly different from that of the healthcare provider.
Healthcare provider-based supply chain pros need to view CATS not as places for people to go on vacation but as places to scope out products, services, trends and viewpoints they likely haven’t heard or seen before that potentially could be used within their operations.
Some say healthcare (providers primarily) is decades behind other industries. More like five years, maybe 10 tops. And that’s largely because everyone other than healthcare providers must pivot quickly. Procrastination, indifference and indecision in other industries that rely on production and direct-to-consumer sales can represent huge costs and significant losses. Meanwhile, healthcare providers, which by and large, rely on funding from public and private payers, can bob and weave and stretch out payment terms because they must offer care to everyone and represent the epitome of an industry “too big to fail” because of the large percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) it represents. Sorry, airlines, automobiles and banks – not sorry.
Don’t think of these non-healthcare CATS as peripheral versus the traditional healthcare CATS. Further, don’t skip the trad CATS to support the others.
Instead, think like a military officer and break your staff into very small teams of specialists to do recon at these other shows. Have them report back with short formal presentations to the entire staff. They win. You win. Your facility wins. Your facility’s clinicians win. Their/your patients win.
Play the long game. The return on investment may seem long in the tooth, but it’s tuskworthy. Spoiler alert: Some of your healthcare colleagues, competitors and peers already are doing this. Miss or ignore the opportunity and be left behind.
R. Dana Barlow serves as a senior writer and columnist for The Journal of Healthcare Contracting. Barlow has nearly four decades of journalistic experience and has covered healthcare supply chain issues for more than 30 years. He can be reached at rickdanabarlow@wingfootmedia.biz.