5 Key Takeaways: Supply Chain Leadership in COVID-19 Times and Beyond

Professor Steve Parente and Professor KK Sinha kicked off Carlson School’s Insights to Action series with a wide-ranging conversation around the challenges and opportunities Covid-19 has presented to healthcare in the United States.

Professor Parente highlighted the successes that Operation Warp Speed has had on vaccine cost and delivery, as well as the data sharing that has made tracking Covid-19 infections and vaccine rates a powerful tool for healthcare decision-makers in the public and private sectors. Professor Sinha discussed the ways Covid-19 stressed the healthcare supply chain and described his vision for post-crisis supply chain leadership. Watch the recording, or read these five key takeaways from their conversation: 

1. Operation Warp Speed has a powerful economic impact 

Operation Warp Speed is a public-private partnership to expedite the availability of Covid-19 vaccines and standardize safety, manufacturing, and distribution. Operation Warp Speed was projected to save $2.4 trillion by accelerating the vaccine delivery timeline by 8 months. For each month saved from the vaccine delivery timeline, the country is expected to shave billions of dollars off the economic impacts and health costs of the pandemic. 

2. Increasing access to data leads to better decision-making 

In June of 2019, President Trump signed an executive order that made claims data from tax-payer funded healthcare programs available to researchers, innovators, providers and entrepreneurs. In the spring of 2020, this newly available data provided a valuable basis for health policy decisions and Covid relief measures for healthcare providers. Data access made tracking doctors visits, hospitalizations, immunization rates and other important metrics possible for decision-makers and the public. 

3. Covid-19 is a crisis too precious to waste for supply chain leadership 

Covid-19 underscored the weakest links in our healthcare supply chain. Experts in supply chain leadership examined the challenges from a wide angle. The last year has underscored the danger of limited supplies of products such as  PPE, Covid-19 test kits, ventilators and vaccines, bottlenecks in processes, limited inventory, finite capacities of hospitals and clinics, challenges with an exhausted healthcare workforce, and wide-ranging quality of goods and services related to Covid-19 care. 

4. Future supply chains need to be reliable, responsive, resilient, and responsible 

Covid-19 showed us that there are broken and weak links in our existing healthcare supply chain and resolving these issues is critical for providing equal care across the country. For example, when supply or capacity breaks down in hospital ICUs, it impacts care in the geographic area the hospital serves. Prioritizing critical care resources based on the variation of risk factors across geographic locations, such as age, race-ethnicity, income and co-morbidities, is a crucial problem for healthcare providers and policy makers to get right. Going forward supply chain leaders need to orient around the guiding principles of reliability, responsiveness, resiliency, and responsibility. 

5. Business as a force for good 

When the mission is bigger than a group, firm, or opposing personalities, people come together to bring life to good ideas. Professor Sinha and Professor Parente underscored the importance of collaboration as we work to collectively overcome the challenge of Covid-19. 

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