After COVID-19 slashed supplies of personal protective equipment, fallout from the pandemic created chronic shortages across many areas of healthcare delivery.
Health systems have stockpiled masks, gowns, gloves, face shields and other PPEs that were scarce during the peak of the pandemic. However, they are currently addressing a prolonged shortage across the entire supply chain, an issue that is believed to persist amid the war in Ukraine and restrictions related to gas supplies, Slow shipping and workforce issues.
David Hargraves, senior vice president of supply chain at Premier, a group purchasing and consulting organization, said the number of items missing is now nearly five times higher than pre-pandemic levels. In January, the number of products in shortage was 10 times higher than the pre-pandemic level.
“Each one of these requires the work of identifying substitutes and changing the overall item data in the enterprise resource planning system. That means supply chain executives aren’t spending time on other cost-reduction strategies,” said Hargraves. “We’ve heard from supply chain executives at several healthcare systems that it’s a huge drain on resources.”
Health systems such as Tampa General Hospital, a 1,040-bed inpatient hospital with 21 affiliated imaging centers in the Tampa, Florida area, and the University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City have been dealing with shortage of contrast agent used for imaging. GE Healthcare, a leading contrast agent supplier, announced in April that it was allocating orders after the COVID-19 lockdown temporarily closed its manufacturing facility in China.
Tampa General Hospital did not have to restrict procedures because it conserved supplies and found an alternative manufacturer. While the market has improved, hospitals must remain vigilant, said President and CEO John Couris. “We had to move some of the contrast supplies to take pictures of the heart,” he said.
Erin Fox, senior director of pharmacy at the University of Utah Health, said China’s zero-tolerance policy on COVID-19 could lead to more shortages because GE Healthcare hasn’t significantly changed its production model its output. “What we saw earlier in the year could happen again,” she said. Fox adds that local anesthetics like lidocaine and epinephrine are surprisingly short-lived.
Contrast media will likely remain in short supply over the next month, according to Premier predictive analytics, which forecast shortages based on response data from around 5% of hospitals the country’s acute care. About 15% of contrast media for medical magnetic resonance imaging and X-ray products could be in short supply over the next three to six weeks, according to a report Premier provided to Modern Healthcare ahead of today’s release date. Thursday.
More than 20% of automated tourniquet systems are expected to be in short supply. Manufacturers of contrasting vehicles and automatic tourniquets are vulnerable to oil and natural gas restrictions in Eastern Europe.
Fifteen percent of emergency drug products, such as stabilizing needles and catheter stabilization devices, and more than 10 percent of interventional specialty diagnoses are expected to be in short supply over the next month, although both neither of these are supplied to European energy suppliers.
In total, 120 commonly used hospital supplies are likely to be in short supply soon, Premier found. “It’s like a Whac-A-Mole issue across a range of products,” said Matt Bossemeyer, Premier IT Services and Supply Chain Analytics.
For pharmaceuticals alone, the Food and Drug Administration lists about 125 drugs that are currently in short supply. One of them is the widely used antibiotic amoxicillin, which is difficult to source due to an increase in respiratory illnesses in children.
Predictive analytics can help supply chain operators and clinicians prepare for shortages. A week’s notice could allow them to test alternative providers and integrate them into their systems. But forecasts for shortages are also likely to spur hoarding, Fox said. Not all hospitals can afford to run out of products, and some will hear about shortages before others, she said.
According to Fox, the FDA is working on a rating system to assess how strong a manufacturing facility’s quality system is and to reward high performers. “We need an efficient supply chain with more transparency to enable risk-based assessment and potential fixes,” she said.
Meanwhile, supply chain disruptions, said David Dobrzykowski, associate professor of supply chain management at the University of Arkansas and director of the university’s Walton College Healthcare Initiative will squeeze the hospital’s finances, which are being challenged by high labor costs and inflation. Health systems and hospitals often pay high prices for substitutes, he said.
The producer price index climbed to 14.3% at the end of August, but manufacturers only pass on 4.2% of those costs to hospitals, according to a white paper written by Dobrzykowski and his colleagues. Supply manufacturers are likely to pass on many of those higher costs in the coming months, he said.
“There is still a lot of inflation pent up in the supply chain. Dobrzykowski said a very small percentage of the manufacturer’s higher costs have been carried forward to date. “While times have been tough for health systems financially, there are no signs that it will ease.”
