Image (from left to right): John Barnes of St. Luke's Health System; René Gurdián Jr. of Ochsner Health; Reuben Mathew Philip of Clarium
One of the biggest conferences in the healthcare supply chain world is in the books.
Industry trade group Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM), of the American Hospital Association, held its annual conference this week from July 26-28, 2026 in San Antonio, Texas. The event brought together more than 1,000 health system supply chain professionals as well as vendors, suppliers, distributors and other key stakeholders.
Amid the education sessions, keynote addresses and countless conversations on the exhibit floor, five themes emerged from this year’s show.
Here’s a rundown:
For a long time, supply chain was relegated to the health system’s proverbial basement and seen as a back office function. No more!
Stephen Downey, Chief Supply Chain and Support Services Officer at Cleveland Clinic, kicked off AHRMM 2026 by declaring that the supply chain in health systems has gone from the back office to being on the board’s agenda.
“We’re not going back,” Downey said.
This is the most consequential generation of supply chain leaders that the profession has ever produced, Downey said, setting the tone for the rest of the show. Every health system needs to empower its supply chain to find savings at a time when health systems are facing unprecedented margin pressures, he said.
As health systems start to deploy agentic AI, they don’t want to accelerate the speed of bad information. In order for automation to work correctly, data needs to be unified and cleaned.
This was a recurring theme heard from several speakers at AHRMM 2026. During various panels throughout the event, supply chain and tech leaders at Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Ochsner Health and St. Luke’s Health all talked about the importance of data integration and integrity.
The data cleaning process can be frustrating as it may mean delaying a go live of a critical system. But this is important as small data irregularities in the ERP and other systems can compound into bigger problems without the right data foundation, said René Gurdián Jr., Vice President of SCM Data Analytics and Transformation at Ochsner Health.
Understanding the importance of data cleaning and unification is part of a larger need for health systems to establish comprehensive data governance protocols. Steven Chyung, Chief Supply Chain Officer at Kaiser Permanente, said his organization is creating governance councils across multiple areas of the health system that are interacting with AI, including clinical, administrative and patient-facing technologies.
Part of data governance is the recognition that the health system itself knows best how to operationalize its own data, rather than vendors, consultants or suppliers.
“We need to be owners of our data,” Gurdián said. “When we talk about this AI world, in order for us to talk about AI, the prerequisite of AI is data governance. We have leaned heavily on the creation and curation of a data governance team that helped us prepare for migration of an ERP conversion.”
With margin pressures on the minds of every health system executive, those championing AI tools in their organization are feeling the pressure to prove the value of those investments.
In the supply chain, panelists at AHRMM said leaders should be ready to speak the language of their audience. In terms of ROI, they should be able to inform others within the organization how the AI tools they use within the supply chain leads to cost savings.
There is an ROI to using AI for supply chain resiliency, said Amanda Chawla, Chief Supply Chain Officer and Post Acute Care Officer at Stanford Health Care (who recently took a job with Providence).
Chawla used the example of a recent fire at one of Stanford’s supplier’s warehouses on how to show the ROI for AI-based resiliency tools. Stanford’s investment into AI for resiliency meant the health system was able to fill critical orders from other warehouses and not have patient care disrupted at all, she said.
As the supply chain grows in prominence, leaders can’t stick to their supply chain silos. The supply chain isn’t just a single job, it’s a portfolio of specializations, said Downey.
Supply chain leaders must speak three languages to run an effective operation, Gurdián said. They have to speak financial and income statements; supply chain category and contracts; and clinical utilization and consumptions.
“You need to be amazing at all three languages,” Gurdián said. “You’re amazing at a million things, so what’s three more languages?”
Bonus: The conference highlighted the excitement happening in hospital supply chains. There is a record number of emerging technologies in the sector. Companies focused on clean data and AI-enabled insights layered on top of existing workflows are the ones that seem to be standing out.