“In today’s environment where Stanford experiences 1500+ disruptions a year, our resiliency is not only adequate, it’s industry-leading. Partnerships like Clarium have helped us stabilize our supply chain to navigate through major events that threaten our system."
The Challenge
The threat of disruptions reached a fever pitch in September 2024, when Hurricane Helene wiped out the Baxter intravenous (IV) fluids factory in North Carolina. At the time of its destruction, the plant was responsible for more than half of the IV fluids distributed across U.S. hospitals. Stanford supply chain teams worked around the clock to protect patient care: sourcing alternative suppliers, monitoring IV inventory system-wide, and negotiating with distributors.
Stanford Health Care, the trailblazing academic health system based in the epicenter of Silicon Valley's tech scene, manages over $4.3B in supply spend each year across 60+ care facilities. Stanford’s supply chain team navigates approximately 1,500+ unique supply disruptions annually across the system, an ever-present challenge that has intensified since the pandemic.
While the team weathered the storm, the effort underscored the need for Stanford to invest in resiliency technology to strengthen its response.
01
Rising Disruption Risk
1500+ Unique Supply Disruptions Annually
02
Limited Visibility
No consolidated view of supply and inventory levels across the 60+ site system.
03
Manual Tracking & Coordination
Teams relied on daily command huddles, spreadsheets to track escalations, substitute approvals, and more.
04
Disjointed Clinical Collaboration
Clinical reviews required one-off approvals without centralized tracking or history.
The Solution
The organization didn’t want to get caught off guard by another massive supply chain disruption ever again. They chose to build a Supply Chain Command Center and deployed Clarium, specifically tapping into its Disruption and Substitute Management capabilities. Stanford chose Clarium for a few key reasons:
Unified Supply Chain Intelligence
Stanford achieved unprecedented supply chain visibility by harmonizing all supply chain systems of record (including data from its EDI, distributor, and 3 ERPs) within Clarium.
Proactive Disruption Alerts
Clarium offered a suite of tools for Stanford teams to monitor disruptions proactively before they became stockouts at hospitals or clinics.
Embedded Automation & Task Management
Clarium went beyond disruption alerts to drive disruption resolution with integrated task assignment and workflow automations.
Co-Development Potential
Clarium teams were willing to work hands-on to customize the solution and even co-develop new features to meet Stanford’s requirements.
Co-Developed Features: “Built at Stanford, Used Everywhere”
As a complex, multi-site academic health system with sophisticated protocols, Stanford required a more advanced deployment than Clarium had ever before supported. The teams collaborated to rapidly develop new features to strengthen Clarium’s disruption management capabilities.
- Custom Disruption Workflows → Alignment to Existing SOPs
- Clinician Disruption View → Better Clinician Communication
- Universal Clarium Disruption → More Proactive Disruption Alerts
- Killed Line Status Monitoring → More Proactive Disruption Alerts
- Advanced Task Automation → Sophisticated Team Coordination
- Disruption Dashboards → Leadership Visibility
While designed around Stanford’s requirements, the updates have benefitted all Clarium customers across the country. Together, the co-developed enhancements ensure that all Clarium users can:
Act Proactively
New alerting features, including a “Universal Clarium Alert” that taps into Clarium’s health system network, equip teams to act at the first sign of disruption, minimizing risk to patient care.
Focus On The Information They Need
Informed by a sophisticated logic layer that incorporates location mapping, item categories, and time-sensitive status, the right information is sent to the right stakeholders, not a firehose of raw data.
Work In Harmony
Advanced task routing and escalation logic ensure that teams work in lockstep coordination to swiftly resolve disruptions.
Disruption confirmed by Clarium
37 impacted items surfaced and scored for relative impact
Substitutes for impacted items identified
Substitutes automatically routed to Stanford clinical teams for validation
Tasks created and auto-assigned to 50+ team members
EDI data lists supplier on "hold" while Clarium detects active orders, giving Stanford a 24 hour ordering advantage
Stanford leverages Clarium to identify excess stock across the system for 4 products with no substitutes.
The Impact
Weathering a Key Supplier’s Cyberattack
As the first major test of Clarium’s impact and Stanford’s progress in strengthening supply chain resiliency, a large-scale disruption hit Stanford in March 2026, when a medical device supplier experienced a crippling cyberattack. This time, Stanford had Clarium live across the system, and set a coordinated response into motion within minutes from initial alert.
While the event would have put thousands of cases at risk if not managed swiftly, Stanford used Clarium to identify at-risk products, identify substitutes, route clinical approvals, and source excess product stock from hospitals across the system. Before 9am in the morning the disruption was flagged, risk was already in the rearview mirror.
Navigating The Tracy, CA Distributor Fire
Only a few months later, a massive fire destroyed Stanford’s primary distributor’s main warehouse in Tracy, CA. The warehouse distributed 95% of the medical supplies that Stanford teams rely on for patient care. Stanford once again leaned on Clarium’s solution as a critical part of its response, using its substitute approval workflows and granular inventory level data throughout its response.
Product SKUs Impacted
Cases Cancelled
“From a supply chain perspective, the Tracy fire was harder for us to manage than COVID. It was more than 7,000 SKUs lost at once. But having Clarium as an information layer, with information on substitute products, inventory across the system, and more, allowed for quick decision-making.”
Future Partnership
As Stanford and Clarium look to the future, the organizations are already building on their momentum of close co-development and innovation.
Stanford continues to embrace true AI-driven automation by co-building several agentic workflows for disruption management using Clarium’s Agent Studio. The first agent, which manages supply discontinuation processes from alert to resolution with limited human intervention, was released this Summer. The teams have identified a shortlist of other agentic workflows to reduce the burden of disruption risk management, better optimize inventory, and ensure price parity with contracted terms.
“This is not a partnership that’s slowing down. We’re collaborating with Clarium on a number of other fronts — both to continue to strengthen our resiliency and to dramatically improve the efficiency of our operations through agentic AI and other emerging technologies for supply chain.”
