For years, healthcare supply chain was largely viewed as a support function focused on purchasing, contracts, logistics, and inventory management. While those responsibilities remain critical, the role of supply chain inside hospitals and health systems has evolved dramatically. Today, supply chain leaders are increasingly influencing clinical operations, financial sustainability, physician engagement, resiliency planning, and patient care itself.
That evolution is reflected throughout this issue and in the organizations HPN has recognized with its Supply Chain Department of the Year honors over the last two years.
Hartford HealthCare, HPN’s 2026 Supply Chain Department of the Year, represents a powerful example of how health systems are rethinking the role of supply chain across the enterprise. Rather than operating in isolation, Hartford HealthCare has integrated supply chain into clinical collaboration, analytics, governance, operational strategy, and financial stewardship in ways designed to directly support the organization’s mission around access, affordability, excellence, and health equity.
What stands out most is the organization’s emphasis on operational discipline and transparency. Hartford HealthCare’s internally developed procedural analytics platform was designed not simply as a finance tool, but as a physician engagement and decision-support platform capable of helping leaders identify variation, strengthen standardization conversations, and improve visibility into procedural utilization patterns.
Those same themes were central to a recent HPN discussion with Omar Devlin at Stanford Health Care, HPN’s 2025 Supply Chain Department of the Year. During the conversation, Devlin described how healthcare organizations are increasingly shifting from traditional “supply chain” thinking toward the “care chain,” a more connected operational framework where supply chain decisions are directly linked to physician workflows, patient outcomes, operational resiliency, and financial performance.
The need for greater visibility and operational intelligence is extending beyond acute care environments as well. As discussed in this issue, ambulatory surgery centers and physician practices are increasingly facing many of the same pressures hospitals have experienced for years, including reimbursement cuts, supply disruption risks, fragmented purchasing processes, rising costs, and growing operational complexity.
What connects all these conversations is the growing realization that supply chain is no longer simply about moving products through healthcare environments efficiently. It is increasingly about supporting smarter clinical decisions, strengthening resiliency, improving financial stewardship, and helping organizations operate more cohesively across the continuum of care.
In many ways, healthcare supply chain is part of care delivery itself.
