As historians look back on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when medical-grade masks were nowhere to be found and demand for ventilators in emergency departments skyrocketed, the critical role of the nation’s group purchasing organizations (GPOs) cannot be overlooked. When COVID-19 rates began to spike, America’s GPOs sifted through thousands of offerings from known, and sometimes fraudulent, suppliers, to ensure hospitals and nursing homes had a steady supply of gloves, gowns, masks, and other Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). When federal and state governments needed help tracking product shortages across the medical supply chain or adjusting supply stockpiles, GPO executives volunteered their time and talents to advise leaders at FEMA and the CDC. As a result of these actions by GPOs, hospitals and nursing homes in the U.S. received millions of gowns, gloves, masks, and ventilators when global demand was at its highest in 2020.
How Group Purchasing Organizations Helped Save Our Health Care Supply Chain From COVID-19
How were the nation’s GPOs able to pivot into this role during a global pandemic? In part, their collective success can be traced back to the creation of the Healthcare Group Purchasing Industry Initiative (HGPII) – a joint effort of the nation’s largest GPOs to evaluate, discuss and promote best practices and high standards within the industry.
With the recent release of its 15th annual report, HGPII has compiled actions GPOs have taken to provide needed medical supplies. Aside from these successes, the report also provides a litany of lessons learned which will only serve to strengthen the health care supply chain in the months and years to come as we continue to deal with the pandemic. This milestone edition of the report highlights myriad ways GPOs solved the biggest challenge facing health care institutions in early 2020: lofty, and often unmet, promises of medical-grade PPE from international sources. In the face of rising COVID-19 rates, the nation’s GPOs were able to do what they’re best at: secure and deliver medical supplies.
Over the past year, bad news about severed supply chains and empty supply shelves has inundated the inboxes of health care executives as consumers nationwide quickly learned that the old ways of securing medical products were unreliable. The good news is that the nation’s GPOs were well equipped; international sourcing teams and real-time supply surveillance technology helped to quickly coordinate a GPO-led strategic response to the country’s medical supply needs. These innovations helped hospitals predict surges in patient volume, demand for ICU units, and implement early warning systems for looming supply shortages. More importantly, GPOs tapped into their networks of independent consultants and used internal expertise to research new international suppliers, assess their capability and the quality of their materials, and ensure safe transactions on behalf of their members which led to the delivery of sorely needed PPE.
With communities around the country still facing long-term challenges due to surges of COVID-19, the nation’s Group Purchasing Organizations will play an important role to ensure medical facilities have the supplies they need. The work of GPOs in 2020 as mediators on behalf of medical facilities in need of supplies and advisors to governments managing large and small stockpiles should be hailed as a success. Given the lessons learned in the last year, and the emerging supply challenges facing medical facilities today, GPOs continue to skillfully plan, innovate, and work hand-in-hand with government agencies to prevent future supply shortages.
Read the HGPII 2021 Annual Public Accountability Report here.
Nine of the nation’s leading GPOs founded HGPII in 2005 to promote and monitor the best ethical and business practices in purchasing for hospitals and other healthcare providers.