Premier Inc. (NASDAQ: PINC) and Resilinc are partnering to help health-care systems navigate supply chain challenges.
Resilinc offers an online cloud platform that connects customers and suppliers — the LinkedIn of supply chain, CEO Bindiya Vakil said. Its mapping service tracks manufacturing sites, their suppliers and inventory levels. The artificial intelligence-powered EventWatch looks for disruptive events across 189 countries, such as fires or regulatory changes, that could affect supply chains connected to those areas.
"Supply chains have been incredibly disrupted for the last year and a half, two years now," Vakil said. "Even prior to Covid, there's a continuous stream of challenges sporadically popping up."
The Resilinc platform gives users the information they need to avoid or lessen the impact of supply chain disruptions.
No financial details of the partnership were provided. Premier and Resilinc have worked together since 2018, including The Exchange platform to help hospitals find medical supplies and the Healthcare Transparency Initiative to build transparency and reduce disruptions.
The partnership is another example of Premier's goal to leverage technology to better support its members, said David Hargraves, senior vice president of supply chain for the Charlotte-based company. Premier forms an alliance of more than 4,400 U.S. hospitals and health systems and about 225,000 other providers.
Premier has played a pivotal role in vetting and securing supplies for its members during the pandemic. Providers were hit hard with shortages in personal protective equipment, or PPE, in 2020. Some of those challenges continued into 2021. Premier focused on improving issues with supplies critical to operation and supplies with unsustainable market concentrations that could cause widespread shortages.
Hargraves said Premier analyzed 400 hospital spend categories, identifying 60 drugs and 60 medical-surgical supplies that were on back order or likely to go on back order. The firm has sought to bolster domestic manufacturing to reduce reliance on foreign products. It partnered with Prestige Ameritech to produce masks and with DeRoyal Industries to produce medical gowns. This summer, Premier also struck a five-year agreement with Honeywell International Inc. (NYSE: HON) to increase access to nitrile exam gloves.
Premier can use Resilinc's data to inform its contract decisions when sourcing products and to ensure continuity in the supply chain, Hargraves said. The firm can now monitor more than 1,300 suppliers across 15,000 sites. Resilinc's RiskShield product provides risk scores based on geography, quality or sustainability practices, among other criteria.
"It gives you the next level of visibility into ... the supplier's supply chain, so that we can now add a new dimension that says, 'Look, we know the product they make, we know they're FDA-approved, we know that they are in a good financial standing, we know that they're not in trouble with any agencies,' all of the vetting that we normally do, and now let's take a deeper look into their operations," Hargraves said.
He views Premier and Resilinc as having similar commitments to more diversity and transparency in the supply chain.
Hargraves said product back-orders will likely continue through most of 2022. Shortages have broadened from a focus on personal protective equipment, or PPE, driven by ongoing global labor and supply issues. He said products to watch could range from food to syringes to napkins.
