Ensuring Hospitals Have Critical Medical Supplies During COVID Pandemic

Challenge

At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a large healthcare client faced shortages of ventilators. While the client faced acute shortages at some facilities, it had sufficient capacity across the enterprise to meet the needs of patients even as ventilators could not be purchased in the marketplace. Providers did not have time to train on different ventilators than those already used in their facilities and the client’s recordkeeping made it difficult to identify which facilities had the same make and model of ventilators to redistribute. Demand spikes due to COVID made facilities reluctant to transfer ventilators from one facility to another.

Discovery & Design

Our supply chain team leveraged the client’s data on ventilator supply and utilization, ventilator models used across each hospital, and COVID caseload forecasting to build a national analytics model with easy-to-use utilization and distribution dashboards. These tools made it simple for leaders to make rapid redistribution decisions, prioritizing the hospitals with the most urgent needs. 

Driving Impact

  • Ensured that none of the client’s hospitals ever ran out of ventilators during the pandemic

  • Enabled the repurposing of up to $30M in proposed spending on ventilators by satisfying demand with existing inventory

Capabilities