Ready or Not: Building Collective Resiliency to Navigate the Next Disruption
SUMMARY
The Healthcare Supply Chain Playbook EXECUTIVE
Achieving a truly resilient healthcare supply chain – one that maintains the right product, quantity, time, place, and price even amidst disruption –cannot be realized by any one organization alone.
These barriers are complex and organizations across the healthcare supply chain must rethink how they work together to achieve more for patients. “Collective resiliency” is this new vision, describing forward-thinking, proactive, and communal behaviours that organizations across the supply chain can embrace to navigate disruptions. The goal is to evolve from a vulnerable supply chain to a resilient one, using these three hallmark behaviours to enable transformation:
Retrospective
Vulnerable Resilient
Solely using past performance or experience to guide decision-making
Forward-looking
Thinking ahead and using a broader set of insights to plan for the future
Reactive
Only responding to disruptions in the moment, once they have occurred
Proactive
Making choices or actions today to prevent or mitigate future disruptions
Individual
Making choices that solely benefit the individual organization or network
Communal
Making choices that prioritize uninterrupted patient care
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These behaviours must be embedded throughout day-to-day activities of the healthcare supply chain – from planning around supply and demand to the distribution and management of products and services. While not an exhaustive list, stakeholders engaged in the development of this document highlighted three activities that can most benefit from more forward-looking, proactive, and communal behaviours. The Playbook in its entirety elaborates on how to embed these behaviours in these activities, with actionable next steps that can be taken to realize them.
Sharing Information
How organizations share information with each other
Contracting Practices
How organizations enter into contracts and agreements
Problem Solving
How organizations work together to mitigate supply disruption
Sharing Information
How organizations share information with each other
Why is sharing information important?
Effective information sharing has the power to strengthen decision-making of organizations across the supply chain through greater transparency and a shared view of the planning context. Today, a lack of standardized data reporting, absence of integrated platforms or tools to aggregate and view data, privacy concerns, and an unwillingness between organizations to share data all hinder the ability to build a comprehensive view of supply and demand that could inform real-time, data-driven decision-making.
What does this look like in a resilient supply chain?
Vulnerable
Resilient RETROSPECTIVE FORWARD-LOOKING
Only historical information is used to inform decisions about future demand and supply
Forecasts, projections, and other sources of information complement historical data, allowing organizations to build a multiyear view of demand and supply
REACTIVE PROACTIVE
Information is only shared by request or based on relationships
INDIVIDUALISTIC
Data and information captured by individual stakeholders are collected differently and in different systems
Data and information is available in realtime, on a single platform for all users to streamline ease-of-use
COMMUNAL
Data is recorded by individual stakeholders in a similar structure or framework to enable easier analysis
What actions can we take to improve information sharing?
ACTION 1: Integrated, centralized data platforms to collect and house all relevant information and provide real-time visibility across the supply chain Consolidates diverse healthcare data regarding procurement, production, inventory management, and shortage mitigation, offering real-time visibility and customizable insights through interactive dashboards and reports.
ACTION 2: Tools for advanced analytics and forecasting to better predict supply disruptions
Incorporates non-traditional information sources such as news articles and industry reports into predictive models and AI-driven global surveillance tools to enhance how organizations anticipate supply chain challenges and make more informed decisions.
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Contracting Practices
How organizations enter into contracts and agreements
Why are contracting practices important?
What does this look like in a resilient supply chain?
Historically, contracts have been fixed agreements with limited ability to remain agile and adapt when the market changes. Well-structured contracts leverage collaboration between involved parties to build agreements with risk-mitigation strategies embedded that ensure timely and reliable provision of healthcare products and services despite disruption Vulnerable Resilient RETROSPECTIVE
Contracts are developed based on historical needs with features and clauses that befit past challenges
FORWARD-LOOKING
Contracts are flexible and developed with future context in mind, informed by forecasting and landscape planning
REACTIVE PROACTIVE
Contract strategies are rigid, neglecting to include approaches that allow for agile responses to supply disruptions
INDIVIDUALISTIC
Organizations prioritize individual benefit or gain (i.e., price or profits) when building and entering into agreements
Contract strategies have multiple mechanisms to enable agility and rapid responses to supply disruptions
COMMUNAL
Stakeholders prioritize balanced risk- and gain-sharing to ensure uninterrupted, safe, quality, and sustainable patient care
What actions can we take to improve contracting practices?
ACTION 1: Building mechanisms for resiliency into contract strategy
Organizations should incorporate flexible terms into contracts to adapt to disruptions, leveraging mechanisms such as split awards, safety stock inventory, and supply chain intelligence to mitigate risks and ensure a stable supply of products or services.
ACTION 2: Clinician-informed guidelines for substitutions
In times of shortages, healthcare organizations face the challenge of evaluating clinical equivalence for alternative products. Pre-established substitution lists enable streamlined decision-making when disruptions occur.
ACTION 3: Embedding additional criteria into decision-making
Expanding contracting decision criteria beyond price to include safety, quality, and sustainability factors will lead to more informed choices and a balanced approach to awarding contracts.
Problem Solving
How organizations work together to mitigate supply disruption
Why is problem solving important?
Collaborative problem solving enables supply chain organizations to individually and collectively respond faster and more effectively to disruptions. Organizations across the healthcare supply chain have traditionally acted independently or within their immediate network to mitigate supply disruptions. This is ineffective when a truly global disruption occurs, as there are numerous “pockets” of uncoordinated and duplicative activity working towards resolving the same problem.
What does this look like in a resilient supply chain?
Vulnerable
Resilient RETROSPECTIVE FORWARD-LOOKING
Organizations solely reflect on lessons learned from past supply disruptions but fail to identify other opportunities for improvement
Organizations reflect on lessons learned but also consider areas of improvement in other areas of the supply chain to build resilience to unknown threats
REACTIVE PROACTIVE
Organizations solve issues “in the moment”, often when patient care has already been negatively affected
INDIVIDUALISTIC
Stakeholders do not coordinate nor collaboratively solution to navigate supply disruptions affecting their organizations
Organizations engage in pre-mortems and proactively address future disruptions through infrastructure and protocol development
COMMUNAL
Organizations at various levels (e.g., local, national, international) come together during disruptions to identify solutions that prioritize equity and patient care
What actions can we take to improve problem solving?
ACTION 1: Multi-stakeholder groups that enable solutioning and decision-making in advance of and during supply disruptions
Improving coordination in response to supply disruptions involves establishing new committees and linking existing forums where stakeholders convene regularly to discuss, plan for, and address potential disruptions.
ACTION 2: Equitable decision-making framework for supply allocation
Establishing an aligned decision-making framework is crucial during disruptions to efficiently allocate limited supplies across organizations and jurisdictions. This reduces the risk of delayed action caused by debates over distribution.
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Consider reviewing the full Playbook for more details and tools to help you advance the actions highlighted here.
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