Hospital C-Suite Needs Better Visibility Into Supply Chain: Black Book Research

A new report published in April 2026 from market research firm Black Book Research should be an eye opener for health system executives as they deal with unprecedented margin pressures affecting their operations.

C-Suite leaders in healthcare increasingly recognize the opportunity to reduce costs in their supply chain but few have the real-time visibility to do so, according to Black Book’s report. The disconnect is creating a haves and have nots in the world of healthcare’s supply chains.

For the report, Black Book surveyed more than 1,300 supply chain professionals at health systems, standalone hospitals, ambulatory providers and large multispecialty clinics. The report reveals that the most advanced enterprise organizations are transitioning the supply chain from a transactional function to an enterprise operating discipline.

But the wider healthcare industry still is catching up to those leading organizations. Here are some key stats from Black Book’s report:

• 90% of respondents say supply chain is one of their top three non-labor levers to improve financial performance over the next 24 months. 
• 83% say their board reviews supply chain key performance indicators less than quarterly per year.
• 81% report their current environment does not provide real-time visibility across all critical supply domains, suppliers and sites of care. 
• 72% say at least half of their critical exception workflows remain manual, which indicates a large day-to-day burden on supply chain employees. 
• 77% say substitution identification and approval is one of the most disruptive bottlenecks affecting continuity of care. 

The findings suggest there is a strong disconnect between what health systems need to reduce costs in their supply chain and what they’re doing right now. Most providers surveyed still used disconnected data solutions and are managing critical exceptions through convoluted workflows. 

On top of stressing hospitals’ already-thin margins, this disconnect is affecting the overall happiness of organizations’ workers and limiting continuity of care for their patients. In other words, this is hitting hospitals where it hurts the most.

The positive news is where there are pain points there is opportunity. More than three-fourths of respondents expect digital control tower, disruption monitoring and workflow orchestration capabilities to become a funded strategic priority by 2028. Organizations that fail to invest in these capabilities will continue to trail the leading organizations that treat supply chain as a margin protection and workflow platform, Black Book reports. 

While there are many companies in this market, Black Book found Clarium’s platform ranked #1 among all vendors in supply chain resilience, a digital control tower, substitution management, supplier risk monitoring and vendor selection intelligence. The report notes that “providers want platforms that unify hospital and supplier data, identify disruptions earlier, accelerate substitute workflows and reduce the lag between signal and action.”

Clarium's platform hit on all of these critical KPIs, according to Black Book's 2026 report.