Premier, Inc. and Resilinc have announced a new collaboration. The initiative is intended to help drive greater supply chain transparency, risk mitigation and business continuity for U.S. healthcare providers according to their press release.
Supply chain disruptions spiked 67 percent in 2020, with the impact of these disruptions rippling across the globe as demand for critical medical supplies and drugs surged 7X to 30X. COVID-19 highlighted the lack of downstream supply chain visibility and reinforced an urgent need to understand product availability and risk, as providers have struggled to access vital healthcare products and medications.
The Resilinc and Premier initiative expands Premier’s supply chain mapping footprint to encompass more than 1,300 suppliers and 15,000 sites. Leveraging Resilinc’s Multi-Tier Mapping service will give Premier visibility down to the site, product and ingredient/part levels for its top supplier partners, allowing for greater transparency into potential vulnerabilities to help ensure continuity of supply, executives said in a Premier press release. Premier will also utilize Resilinc’s RiskShield, which provides comprehensive supplier risk scores based on geographic diversity, recovery time, quality, environmental, social and governance (ESG) and sustainability practices, and other key criteria.
In addition to enhanced supply chain mapping and supplier risk assessments, Premier will leverage EventWatchAI, Resilinc’s 24/7 monitoring service. EventWatchAI uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to monitor for over 50 types of potentially disruptive events across millions of news, social media and government agency feeds in 189 countries and 100 languages.
"Our collaboration with Resilinc is yet another step forward in Premier’s steadfast, multi-year commitment to protect healthcare providers from shortages,” said David A. Hargraves, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain for Premier.
Premier and Resilinc’s partnership goes back to 2018. In the time since, the companies have collaborated on multiple projects aimed at increasing the maturity of global healthcare supply chains. Key projects include The Exchange, a cloud-based platform for hospitals to interact with vetted peer organizations to identify, locate and exchange critical medical items, and the Healthcare Transparency Initiative, a first of its kind collaboration focused exclusively on improving transparency and reducing disruptions in the healthcare supply chain.
