In the face of ongoing supply disruptions and increasing pressures, Sutter Health has turned to a NASA-inspired approach called Tiger Teams.

Tiger Teams were first implemented by the California-based health system in 2020 during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic; the small, cross-functional groups are designed for rapid response and execution. Meena Medler, chief supply chain officer at Sutter Health, spoke to Becker’s about how this initiative has helped the health system grow its supply resiliency.

Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Question: Sutter Health created “Tiger Teams” inspired by NASA. What does the model look like in Sutter Health’s context?

Meena Medler: The core characteristics of that NASA-inspired Tiger Team is that it’s a small and focused cross-functional, high-execution, high-impact team.

If you really think about supply disruptions, supply resiliency has been a big opportunity, even, more recently, with IV fluids and Baxter. The most important things we have to ask ourselves are:, How do we bring that quality team? How do we bring in our logistics team? How do we work with our distribution team? How do we come up with an executable plan and process and minimize the impact of any type of disruption in one component?

Q: Who makes up the Tiger Teams within the health system?

MM: It depends on what we’re trying to solve. For instance, right now, if I have to accelerate within, supply chain, there are supply chain operations, the procurement team, sourcing team, procurement analytics and our implementation integration teams. As we look at all of it, if I have to accelerate certain aspects of savings initiatives, I need individuals to focus on three things and do it in 30-, 60-, 90-day sprints.

How do we sprint and how do we leverage and contract teams? It’s end-to-end execution, and everything needs to happen systematically. What I measure is, how fast can we go from negotiating decisions, executing on the contract, updating the item master, and burning the current inventory?

Q: Why did you choose the 30-, 60-, 90-day sprint cadence, and how does it help drive supply results at Sutter Health?

MM: This sprint model helps define our focus. It helps prioritize elements with the maximum amount of impact. It helps people really feel like they can focus, so they can make an impact and see the results.

Developing sprints in this way is really about people. It’s about the ability to create a process in a short period of time, but also see the impact of it, deliver the impact. If you look at Sutter, we’re moving quickly. We are expanding access to care for our patients in numerous ways. We want to meet the pace and the goals to meet the demand for our services. In order to do that, we have to be able to ensure that we achieve what we set out to achieve.

This sprint model allows us to bring in different people with fresh perspectives.

Our people get experience doing something different, so it gives them the skills to work on something that they probably didn’t work on before.

Q: How do these teams work with clinical or operational staff to ensure solutions across those needs?

MM: My background is as a physician assistant. I spent a lot of my time delivering care by the bedside and working alongside various clinicians, nurses, physicians, allied health professionals, and I’ve led operations. So that gives me a little bit of a unique perspective coming in. Everything that our supply chain team does at Sutter is from the patient, the clinician, and the operations perspective.

We also have a physician dyad team and alignment with the nursing leadership. It is essentially a triad between supply chain, nursing, and our physicians, which allows us to get their insights and make sure that we’re making very collaborative decisions. It’s really about gathering all individuals who are coming from across the organization and representing their areas and collectively making a decision.

Traditionally, we’ve always said, here is the market intelligence, and this is what we’re going to do to achieve savings. As a not-for-profit health system, we take what we earn and reinvest back into our communities. Our goal is the greatest value comes when we all sit down and look at the data collectively and make the best decision for our patients, our internal stakeholders, and our organization. Our approach is collaboration and partnership, both internally and externally, to drive the greatest value. If you really think about that, the approach is also a Tiger Team approach. We are taking multidisciplinary team members to look at and create strategy collectively, make a decision collectively, and execute and manage the change across the organization. It’s a small group of experts trying to make sure that we deliver the greatest value and the best decision in an accelerated fashion for the benefit of our patients.

Q: What kind of impact have you seen so far from implementing the Tiger Teams?

MM: The goal of supply chain operations is to bring the right product or right service at the right time to the right place for the right patient. We are working behind the scenes to procure the right product at the right price and making sure that it is available and hitting the shelf for the care of the patients.

We are implementing technology to support the team so they work smarter, and we need to be able to scale. We believe the Tiger Team approach is value-added because we are constantly learning from it, evolving, and continuously improving.

The post Inside Sutter Health’s NASA-inspired initiative to tackle supply disruptions appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.