Healthcare organizations are facing a convergence of pressures across supply chains, clinical operations, and workforce capacity. From global logistics disruptions and increasingly complex therapies to persistent infection risks and seasonal surges, leaders are being forced to rethink resilience at every level of care delivery. Across the industry, a clear theme has emerged: preparedness now depends as much on collaboration, visibility, and planning as it does on scale.
Large logistics providers accelerated their push into healthcare in 2025, responding to growing demand for temperature-controlled, time-critical, and highly regulated supply chain services. Ongoing vulnerabilities in healthcare logistics pushed hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and medical device companies to prioritize resilience, compliance, and end-to-end visibility, which are areas where global carriers hold significant scale advantages. UPS, DHL, and FedEx expanded healthcare as a core growth vertical, investing heavily in cold chain infrastructure, specialized facilities, digital tracking, and regulatory expertise to support fast-growing segments such as biologics, cell and gene therapies, specialty pharmaceuticals, and high-value medical devices.
Contributor Kara Nadeau explored how leaders at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital and Nemours Children’s Hospital are improving patient safety and reliability through intentional collaboration between the operating room and sterile processing department. Rather than engaging only when issues arise, both organizations established structured leadership partnerships spanning perioperative services and SPD, aligning teams around shared accountability and reinforcing sterile processing as foundational to safe surgery.
At Lurie Children’s, collaboration is embedded into daily practice through joint rounding, cross-department shadowing, and standardized reviews of upcoming cases to proactively address instrumentation and scheduling risks. These efforts have virtually eliminated immediate use steam sterilization and rapid cycles while delivering measurable cost savings. At Nemours, leaders rebuilt a once-strained OR/SPD relationship through mirrored leadership roles, daily huddles, a technician-led tray quality committee, and data-driven tracking of bioburden events, supported by strong education and recognition programs. Together, these approaches demonstrate how aligned leadership, routine collaboration, frontline engagement, and constructive use of data can drive meaningful gains in safety, quality, and culture.
Editor Matt MacKenzie reported that health officials were already on alert following an unusually severe and prolonged flu season in the Southern Hemisphere, often viewed as a predictor for the U.S. and Europe. Hospitals now face mounting clinical, operational, and supply chain pressures, underscoring the need for proactive planning, resilient supply chains, and adequate inventories of diagnostics and PPE.
