Title tussle

As human beings equipped with “healthy” egos, some more fragile than others, we are obsessed with titles.

How they sound behind, or in front of, our names. What they convey. What they do for us.

From the staid and stodgy to the sanctimonious and sarcastic (yes, I’m referring to you dot-com silly geese that foisted “Vice President of Stuff” into the corporate lexicon at the turn of the millennium), titles not only define what we do but who we are — or think we are or wish to be viewed.

Back in the late 1990s during the Clinton Administration’s healthcare reform movement, you may recall healthcare materials management leaders sought a title update (or upgrade).

Driven in part by a desire to elevate the profession as well as a way to justify and reinforce the profession’s importance and usefulness to a healthcare organization besieged by declining reimbursement and increased costs (not much has changed in two decades, eh?), materials management professionals sought something seemingly shiny enough to attract the C-suite’s corporate eye for flashy hood ornaments — and avoid the headhunters who favored labor cuts and layoffs as decisive, quick, short-term solutions to stanch fiscal bleeding. Truly, these were unsettling times.

As a title back then, materials management had been widely accepted for several decades even though “purchasing” remained popular in all industries outside of healthcare for its utility and concision. After all, manufacturers and retailers alike knew the identity of the senior vice president of purchasing and how important he or she was to the corporation, a development not enjoyed nearly enough in healthcare, which shared the “purchasing” moniker with the insurance industry that used it differently.

As materials management pros fretted over their C-suite-determined futures, they migrated to a more nebulous title that seemed to represent the human and product capital they professed to manage so adeptly: Resource management. Perhaps this would blunt the budgetary, cost-cutting measures, brought about by reduced reimbursement, corporate consolidation and labor unrest.

Of course, that title remained popular for a relatively short time as “supply chain” emerged as a functional connection to other industries and as a descriptor and indicator of an expanded scope and span of duties.

Outside of healthcare, several new concepts have emerged that might make for intriguing title options inside of healthcare should supply chain pros seek another update.

Two stand out. The first involves corporate and Wall Street bellwether Amazon, which employs supply chain pros to carry out its functional goals of fulfillment. Now imagine if a healthcare organization, trying to sound “Amazonified,” employed a Vice President of Fulfillment? Alas, that may be too insider.

The second involves a technology concept generating steam outside of healthcare and on the pharmaceutical side within healthcare as a track-and-trace mechanism: Blockchain.

Basically, blockchain represents a big database shared by an even larger network of computers. In my Rube Goldbergian mind, blockchain sounds much like automated proprietary electronic data interchange (EDI) with built-in translation software on steroids, or something like a turbo-charged value-added information technology network — think VAN-plus. In a way, it could be viewed as supply chain’s IoT 2.0. It’s designed to remove those human-based accounting errors that call for data cleansing, but somehow falls short of the fictional Cyberdyne Systems Skynet concept. None of us wants to be terminated.

Unfortunately, “blockchain” may be too techy with an “alpha-male” vibe to encapsulate all the clinical facilitation and consulting relationships that contemporary supply chain leaders claim to pursue and want.

As Healthcare Purchasing News closes out its year-long celebration of four decades in operation and enters its fifth decade, perhaps the profession should consider a useful next-generation title that focuses on its core functions as they relate to clinical and administrative customers: Products and Purchased Services