How Medline used partnerships and innovation to redefine supply chain during COVID
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as providers struggle to procure vital devices and equipment, Medline Industries is leveraging its longstanding commitment to partnership by assisting and educating healthcare organizations across the continuum of care in this critical time of need.
In a conversation with Modern Healthcare Custom Media, Jim Boyle, executive vice president for Medline Industries, discussed the biggest lessons from the pandemic and how the industry should be re-imagining supply chain for the future.
What has Medline’s experience been like throughout COVID?
The last two years have been a roller-coaster ride for sure. The first thing we did was enact our emergency response plan and thankfully it was well thought out and on point. We quickly established a COVID-19 steering committee and in early March, we went to a work from home environment. Our customer service team, which is critically important, literally went from 100,000 calls a month to 300,000 calls a month. We didn’t miss a beat working from home, which has been something that we’re really proud of.
Our manufacturing and distribution employees have been essential to ensuring continuity of the supply chain. Without them the supply chain would have come to a halt. We made sure to put COVID safety protocols in place to keep them safe and added an additional COVID bonus to reward them for coming into work at a really challenging time.
One of the most important lessons we learned was to make sure we were communicating with our customers on a consistent, frequent basis, making sure to provide them with 100 percent of the information, meaning the good, the bad and the ugly, because if you don’t tell them the whole story, they won’t know how to react and respond.
Addionally, many of our customers got into the business of selfsourcing during the pandemic. In doing so, there were many lessons learned. Several of the early rounds of products many customers sourced were either extremely poor quality, not what they ordered, or it didn’t even show up. We quickly offered to help by giving them access to our quality inspectors across the globe. We offered this service to both private industry and in-conjunction with governmental agencies.
It was a tremendous journey, with a ton of collaboration. I would give kudos to the way the public-private partnerships worked. We had daily calls that gave clear direction along with creating a reporting mechanism that gave us all a direct line of sight into the markets having the highest COVID cases. It was really amazing. We were side-by-side with our competitors working collaboratively toward a common goal.
How did day-to-day operations change for Medline?
A few things we had to do immediately to make sure we were able to continue to execute were supporting, educating and coaching our teams and our customers. When you think about our organization and the way we engage our customers in normal times, it’s through faceto-face onsite engagement with our sales force, clinical support teams and our account managers. They weren’t allowed to go onsite during the pandemic, so we had to work with our customers, understanding what their needs were on a regular basis, in this new virtual medium.
We were guiding them down the path of what their options were, working with them on their allocation parameters to make sure they weren’t over-utilizing supplies and educating them on where they could reduce utilization of PPE so they could continue to supply PPE in the most critical areas.
We also took immediate action to change our production capabilities. In less than four weeks, we converted an existing factory that had never produced hand sanitizer before and added the capability to produce 400,000 bottles of sanitizer per week.
We also started production of face masks in our manufacturing facility in Lithia Springs, GA, which provides capacity for up to 36 million face masks per month. This new production adds to our existing footprint of more than 20 product manufacturing facilities throughout North America.
A lot of people talk about the supply chain being broken during COVID. In my opinion, the supply chain actually worked tremendously well. In 2020, Medline delivered over 20 billion personal protective apparel items, such as exam gloves, masks, and isolation gowns. For context, that is a 150 percent increase in annual gown volumes and more than 300 percent increase in face masks. So, when you think about the supply chain, it was able to expand and grow at a very, very fast rate. Was the supply chain able to meet the entire needs of the market? No. But when the market needs to expand up 10 to 20 times with no notice and there isn’t a significant stockpile of finished goods available at the time of need to fill the production gap, it’s pretty much impossible.
How should the current supply chain infrastructure change as a result of COVID?
When I think about the future,
I think a major factor will be to incorporate a robust finished goods stockpile in the U.S. that lives within the existing healthcare supply chain infrastructure. Today, when you think about the strategic national stockpile (SNS), it was meant to support short term surge capacity. It wasn’t meant for widespread and sustained long-term pandemictype challenges. In addition, this will require all of us to diversify our supply chains to incorporate many different initiatives: domestic production, finished good capacity expansion and multisource production sites, etc. We as an industry, along with the government, have to work together on a plan to redesign the SNS and the ability to deploy product effectively so we are much more prepared the next time around.
Are you thinking about Medline’s business differently going forward?
As it relates to the needs of the pandemic and how we support our customers going forward, we plan to build out an emergency response solution that incorporates a robust stockpiling effort. This program will be built within our existing infrastructure, giving our customers the opportunity to have a stockpile within our supply chain that will be available at a moment’s notice. They won’t have to buy the inventory up front, and they will be able to access a pooled inventory that is managed daily, preventing any chance of expiration or obsolescence.
How has the role of the hospital and health system CEO evolved when it comes to supply chain?
Pre-COVID, we spent a lot of time with the chief supply chain officers, who we’ve always seen as a critical strategic role within healthcare. During COVID, the role of supply chain and its importance was elevated. It became extremely visible with the lack of access to PPE and its impact on care and those who were providing the care. CEOs of healthcare organizations were working hand-in-hand with the supply chain executives to make sure they had the full support needed to gain access to PPE. Over the last two years, I personally spoke to at least 100 CEOs, many of whom I had never spoken to before, sharing information and collaborating on solutions. It was truly all hands-on deck.
Medline has talked a lot about systemness. Can you talk about what that means to you and to Medline?
When I think about systemness, it’s about educating internally and externally to make sure we’re caring for our patients in the right environment, giving them the best care at the lowest cost and looking at the entire organization as one, not as point of care silos. At Medline we have been looking at the market this way for the last 15 years. We built our approach to the market by creating expertise and support by each care setting, integrating all of it within one umbrella, Medline, and creating a cohesive, consistent approach to the entire continuum of care.
Can you offer an example of how you have been partnering with health systems in unique ways throughout COVID?
I will give you a few ways we worked with one of our key customers. Advantus Health Partners, a subsidiary of Bon Secours Mercy Health, is an organization I would consider very forward thinking. Fortunately, we had already developed an integrated partnership with them before COVID. They currently lease about 100,000 square feet within our distribution center in Columbus, Ohio, where they leverage our supply chain capabilities to deliver many nontraditional med-surg supplies and services throughout their network.
During COVID, they did a tremendous amount of their own self-sourcing to add on to what we were able to supply. They were able to leverage that space and our distribution infrastructure to get these supplies deployed within their organization. They have 1,300 slots of PPE in our distribution center that we manage for them.
We also vetted out several products they sourced overseas as they came into the distribution center to make sure they were getting what they paid for. When I think about Bon Secours Mercy Health, they are a great example of a partner leveraging our resources as if they were their own. And we would do the same with them. I would call Dan Hurry, the CEO of Advantus Heath Partners, and say, ‘Hey Dan, if you have any excess PPE that may turn into surplus, let’s redeploy some of these goods you bought to another customer that doesn’t have enough.’ There was a lot of sharing going on, which is indicative of what happened during COVID.
Their supply chain organization really took an innovative approach to solving problems and dug in to support their facilities during this time of need.
What is the biggest takeaway you want healthcare leaders to have from the pandemic regarding supply chain?
On a go-forward basis I think it’s important for all of us, both provider and supplier, to leverage our resources as one consistent, cohesive team that truly is an integrated partnership. This isn’t something that has been consistent in the past. At Medline, we are very fortunate to have quite a few customers with whom we are already operating in an integrated partnership model, but the industry as a whole tends to operate more in a transactional relationship. I think one of the most important things we all have to take away from this is to look at and value each other as allies.