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How a national health system is building supply chain resilience

Clarium Health
Jul 11, 2025
Blogs
How a national health system is building supply chain resilience
1:36

Recently, a procurement specialist at a national health system faced a widespread shortage of essential medical supplies, including EKG electrodes, arterial catheters, and specific procedure packs. With no readily available substitutes and no new stock arriving from the vendor, the risk of delaying patient procedures was imminent. 

This high-stakes scenario highlights a fundamental paradox in the modern healthcare landscape. Large health systems, often spanning multiple states and hundreds of facilities, are formed with the promise of pooled resources and enhanced patient care. Yet, the operational reality can be far more complex. Disparate data systems, disconnected teams, and thousands of miles can create silos that hinder the very collaboration these systems are meant to foster. 

The result? Critical supply chain decisions are often made with an incomplete picture, leading to situations where one hospital has a surplus of a vital product while another faces a critical shortage. This not only drives up costs but can directly impact a hospital's ability to deliver care. 

But what if there was a way to break down these silos?
 

What if a procurement specialist in one state could seamlessly coordinate with hundreds of stakeholders across the country to prevent a supply disruption before it impacts a single patient?  

This isn't a hypothetical scenario. It's the reality for one of our partners that is leveraging the Clarium platform to transform its approach to hospital inventory management and supply chain resilience. 

The Challenge

A system-wide shortage and a race against time

Before implementing an automated supply chain management platform like Clarium, this scenario would have triggered a cascade of inefficient, manual workflows. The procurement specialist would have had to send out mass emails, hoping for a response from someone, somewhere in the vast network, who might have extra stock.  

This process was fraught with challenges: 

  1. Lack of Visibility: There was no centralized way to see real-time inventory levels across all facilities.  

  2. Delayed Communication: The back-and-forth of emails and phone calls to determine quantities and coordinate logistics could take days, if a response was received at all.  

  3. Inventory Hoarding: Without a trusted, transparent system, individual facilities were often incentivized to hold onto their own "stash" of supplies to protect their own patients, working against the collective goal of the health system.  

This traditional approach was not just slow; it was a barrier to achieving supply chain resilience and realizing the full potential of a large, integrated health system.

 

The Solution

AI-driven automation and system-wide coordination 

Using the Clarium platform, the specialist was able to take a completely different, more effective approach. Instead of sending out a hopeful plea for information, she could proactively and decisively manage the situation. 

The platform provided a single pane of glass, unifying data from their multiple ERP systems and offering a real-time view of inventory levels across every hospital in her purview. This is a core component of our healthcare supply chain software, which integrates disparate data sources to provide a unified, actionable view.  

Here’s how she turned data into decisive action: 

  1. Identify the Imbalance: From her centralized dashboard, she could instantly see which hospitals had an excess of the needed supplies and which were about to run out. She didn't just see raw numbers; she saw each facility's inventory "runway" relative to its specific demand. 

  2. Initiate Action with a Click: Armed with this system-wide intelligence, she used the platform’s task management capabilities to create and assign action items. She directed a hospital with a surplus to send a specific quantity of electrodes to a facility facing an immediate shortage.  

  3. Streamline Communication: The entire workflow—from identifying the need to confirming the shipment—was managed and tracked within the platform. This created a clear, contemporaneous timeline of all actions taken, eliminating the confusion of siloed email chains and creating a single source of truth for all stakeholders. This process mirrors the ease and familiarity of a social media platform, making communication intuitive and effective across disconnected teams. 

In a matter of minutes, not days, she was able to strategically redistribute inventory across the system, ensuring that patient care continued uninterrupted. This wasn't a one-time fix; she has since used this exact automated supply chain workflow to manage shortages of various critical items.  

 

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The Impact

Building a truly resilient supply chain 

This story is more than just a successful case of hospital backorder management. It illustrates a fundamental shift in how large health systems can operate. By leveraging an AI-driven supply chain automation platform, they can move from a reactive, siloed model to a proactive, collaborative one. 

The benefits extend far beyond a single product disruption: 

  • Enhanced Visibility & Control: Teams gain the ability to manage their operations at any scope, from a single department to an entire region, with a few clicks.

  • Reduced Waste & Costs: Proactive redistribution minimizes the need for expensive overnight shipping and reduces the risk of products expiring on a shelf in one location while being desperately needed in another. This is key to helping reduce hospital supply chain costs.

  • Improved Patient Outcomes: Ultimately, a more efficient and resilient supply chain ensures that clinicians have the supplies they need, when they need them, to provide the best possible care. It allows a large health system to actualize the promise of its existence: pooling resources to benefit all patients.  

This is the future of healthcare supply chain management. It’s about leveraging technology not just for data's sake, but to power smarter, faster workflows that build a truly resilient supply chain and allow healthcare professionals to focus on what matters most: their patients. 

 

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