ROCHESTER, Minn. (PRWEB)
June 12, 2023

The Healthcare Industry Resilience Collaborative (HIRC), a non-profit consortium of healthcare supply chain leaders focused on increasing transparency and resiliency, today recognized the first awardees of the new HIRC Transparency Partner Badge. This distinction validates the companies’ continuous efforts and commitment to supply chain transparency and resiliency.

The inaugural badge awardees are:

• B. Braun
• BD
• Cardinal Health
• Cook Medical
• Innovative Health
• Medtronic
• Philips
• Sandoz
• Stryker

The awardees gave two primary reasons for pursuing the badge: to increase trust with providers, and to increase supply chain reliability to improve patient outcomes.

“HIRC Transparency Badging is an outstanding step forward for the healthcare industry to define what good looks like in supply chain transparency and resiliency,” said Tom Harvieux, chair of HIRC, and chief supply chain officer at BJC HealthCare. “We invite all suppliers to join HIRC and pursue the transparency badge,” Harvieux said.

HIRC is an organization of hospitals and suppliers – lead by AdventHealth, BJC HealthCare, Corewell Health, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Stanford Health Care, and others – that has come together to promote resilience and transparency in the healthcare supply chain.

“The healthcare supply chain has lacked definitive information telling buyers when they can trust a supplier to be transparent—until now,” added Bill Selles, SVP Supply Chain at Corewell Health.

Commentary from the healthcare provider community and supplier awardees affirms the value of the transparency badging program.

To qualify for the transparency badge, each awardee granted full visibility to all provider members regarding the following transparency measures:

• Mapping insights of final assembly and beyond for all locations that provide critical and essential products sold into the U.S. market
• A Business Continuity Maturity (BCM) assessment

“Providers can only reward transparent and resilient suppliers if we can tangibly identify who they are, and we need more providers to use the evidence-based badges to support purchasing decisions,” says Katie Dean, Business Operations and Transformation Leader at Stanford Health Care.

The HIRC transparency badge is an important step toward greater transparency, and transparency is a critical foundation to healthcare supply chain resiliency. This reality was reinforced by a recent survey of HIRC’s provider and supplier members. According to the findings:

• 99% of providers and suppliers agree that in order to create a more resilient healthcare supply chain, we must increase transparency.
• 100% of providers and 92% of suppliers agree that transparency, including visibility to geography and business continuity planning, is important to supply chain resiliency.
• 77% of providers are more likely to do business with a supplier who has the Transparency Badge, all else being equal.
• 88% of suppliers agree that having the Transparency Badge will have a positive and meaningful impact on their customer’s perception of them.

When asked to select the 3 most important components to transparency, communications candor, criticality alignment, upstream visibility, and risk awareness rose to the top:

• Candor on potential supply chain disruptions (73%)
• Alignment on what are the critical products needing protection (50%)
• Visibility into my upstream supply chain (49%)
• Awareness to external risks to the upstream supply chain (49%)
• Sharing of risk assessments to characterize preparedness (48%)
• Bi-directional sharing to make demand v. capacity more accessible (29%)

The transparency badge process is simple to follow, standardized, and empowers trusted relationships. The badge itself is only a step, but HIRC believes it is an important milestone in enabling a collaborative approach to solving for supply chain resiliency.

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