Clinical and Supply Chain Collaboration: An International Perspective

Late last year, I once again attended the winter conference of the Health Care Supplies Association (HCSA), the procurement association for the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and a sister organization of AHRMM, the professional supply chain association for the American Hospital Association. I first attended the HCSA conference in 2016 when I was chair-elect of AHRMM, and after attending a total of seven such events, I am intrigued by two overarching themes:

• The similarity in the challenges faced by our respective healthcare systems, despite the differences in how they are financed and governed.
• How supply chain professionals in both countries are increasingly supporting the overarching healthcare needs of our respective nations.  

Both the United States (U.S.) and the U.K. find themselves spending more money caring for persons with chronic disease. In the U.S., nearly 90 percent of our total health expenditures go toward chronic disease, and that will only increase with the aging of the population and earlier onset of chronic disease in children, especially those of low socioeconomic status. The U.K. also spends a majority of its money in healthcare on chronic disease, roughly 75 percent.  

The chief commercial officer of the U.K. Department of Health and Social Care, Stuart Nelson, noted the primary drivers of chronic conditions, including health inequities and climate change, and how the prevalence of chronic disease lowers worker productivity, and in turn tax revenues available for health services. That’s why the U.K. government is prioritizing prevention and more care being delivered in the community vs. the hospital setting. With similar causes and impacts of chronic disease in the U.S., the private health sector is also starting to shift priorities. An interesting experiment to watch will be how well our respective countries do, given healthcare delivery in the U.K. is primarily government run, while mostly a private affair in the U.S.  

Regardless of who funds and runs healthcare, the supply chain can play an important role. To do so, supply chain will need to enhance its ability to collaborate with an even greater number of partners, a key theme at the HCSA conference. Since that first conference in 2016, I’ve watched how HCSA has promoted not only greater collaboration with vendors but also with clinical leaders.  

Andrew New, the chief executive of NHS Supply Chain, noted the collaborative relationship between the commercial and clinical leads at the government agency. Michelle Johnson and Richard Evans, the clinical and commercial executive directors, respectively, each spoke ardently about how collaboration can achieve savings, through both improved supply chain and clinical efficiencies. As an example, Deborah Clatworthy, deputy chief nurse at a north central London hospital, spoke about how she collaborated with supply chain to improve the preparation of catheter trays. Not only were they able to reduce the amount of time nurses had to spend gathering the different products required on the tray, but they also reduced catheter-associated infections by 80 percent, a win for the hospital and especially for patients.

Examples like this illustrate the value of collaboration, but I agree with conference speakers who believe there is much more that can be done, especially as it relates to the human and economic costs of chronic disease. Here is where I see opportunities for supply chain and clinical leaders from our respective nations to share best practices around reducing health inequities and the negative environmental consequences of healthcare operations. U.S. healthcare can learn a lot from the NHS’s journey to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions, which is also a government directive. On the other hand, I believe U.S. supply chain professionals are leading the way in supporting health equity through supplier diversity and other initiatives to spur community wealth building in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where chronic disease is the highest. In the coming months, I plan to share more of these stories for our collective learning and advancement.