Harmonic inversion

During the late 1990s, a “dark-and-gritty” period for superhero comics in terms of character personalities and story themes, as well as the final results and outlooks of their publishers, critically acclaimed writer Kurt Busiek, author of the award-winning “Astro City” series and “Marvels” limited series, described his craft in a rather profound way.

Paraphrasing here, Busiek basically delineated the archetypal and iconic superhero story in two ways: The classic method involves the superhero living and operating in the “real” world where the tale unfolds from his or her perspective. The other method, reflected in “Astro City” and “Marvels,” involves “real” people living and operating in a superhero world where the tale unfolds from the perspective of a “random” character narrating his or her viewpoint on life and how the superhero’s decisions and actions impact the world.

What made Busiek’s technique so creative was that it refreshingly inverted the traditional framework to upend the genre and entertain fans.

The healthcare industry — particularly the supply chain segment — could use a dose of that as it marvels over Amazon’s perceived encroachment into the market.

The traditional perspective we’ve witnessed within the last few years centers on Amazon operating in a healthcare world and how the online retailer will disrupt the status quo and disintermediate certain participants from sharing in the revenue-and-profit pie. Numerous articles, editorials, panel discussions, white papers and webinars dissecting and pontificating on the proliferating possibilities. (The August 2017 SKU’d column, “Prime directive” merely contributes to the noise with a degree of snarkasm.)

Amazon executives spent the better part of the last few years researching and studying the healthcare industry — covertly and overtly — in an effort to learn how the company might venture to “do it better.”

Let them.

Perhaps it’s time for the healthcare industry to invert its thinking. Instead of fretting over how Amazon would operate in the healthcare world, ponder how healthcare might operate in an Amazon world? Perhaps more pointedly, how might healthcare research and study Amazon and its fulfillment methods? As Amazon teams with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, and picks up online pharmacy PillPack for a cool billion dollars, how might Healthcare Inc. reverse-engineer the online retailer’s strategies and tactics for its own use (short of, say, recruiting Amazon executives to “Amazonify” selected healthcare companies)?

What can healthcare learn from Amazon? The blueprint is evident.

1. Amazon knows how to extract an emotional response from you by presenting an accessible and appealing search capability to find what you want (need) for a variety of prices (contract or otherwise)
2. Amazon tracks what you buy.
3. Amazon makes it easy for you to transact business… and check out.
4. Amazon can deliver it to you within hours (using apparently any average joe/jane driving a vehicle).
5. Amazon can calculate when you might want/need something again or based on your demographic and psychographic profile it’s been concocting from your browsing habits (demand forecasting).

This more accurately reflects fulfillment, in terms of product, process and experience, the art of supply chain. And the healthcare supply chain desperately needs this.

Amazon offering drugs and medical supplies through GPO contracts or in competition with GPO contacts doesn’t really matter. Whether GPOs go Amazon doesn’t matter either. (Neoforma, Medibuy and their webmates all launched in healthcare a few years after Amazon. Some contend that GHX offers the closest to an Amazon experience in healthcare other than … Amazon.)

What does matter is whether YOU do something.

How about implementing a One-Connection/One-Source/One-Touch program like Atlanta’s Piedmont Healthcare, the 2018 Supply Chain Department of the Year? All it takes is one read a few pages in (and a few clicks at HPN Online) and one email to Joe Colonna’s office (or maybe catch him at the AHRMM conference in Chicago this month).