As supply costs rise and disruptions persist, health systems are finding new ways to balance cost while building more reliable supply chains. Leaders are focusing on smarter purchasing, closer clinical partnerships and optimizing data to ensure high-quality care while controlling cost.

Here are responses from seven supply chain leaders who were asked: What is one way your health system is balancing cost control with supply chain resilience?

Note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.

Joseph Carr, RN. Vice President of Supply Chain and Support Services at Akron (Ohio) Children’s: At Akron Children’s, balancing cost control with long-term supply chain resilience is a strategic imperative — one we approach through deliberate planning, cross-functional collaboration, and data-driven execution. Our integrated Supply Chain Strategic Plan is built on six core pillars, with logistics, distribution, inventory and assurance operating under the broader strategic sourcing umbrella. This structure fosters alignment across operations, sourcing and clinical priorities, allowing us to improve both efficiency and responsiveness systemwide.

To strengthen supply assurance, we’ve implemented a real-time dashboard to monitor critical products, expanded emergency preparedness playbooks, and optimized our distribution models for greater operational agility. In parallel, our strategic sourcing team has developed a three-year savings road map focused on advancing our position on the value pyramid, ensuring initiatives deliver measurable cost savings while supporting quality outcomes. Guided by the theme “Collaboration. Performance. Value.,” our supply chain strategy reflects a commitment to delivering sustainable value and resiliency across the care continuum, supporting both our mission and the patients we serve.

Jorge Hernandez. Vice President of Supply Chain Services and Chief Procurement Officer at Broward Health (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.): At Broward Health, our supply chain resilience begins with our greatest asset: our people. We empower cross-functional teams to develop innovative, cost-effective strategies while maintaining critical stock levels. By promoting a culture of collaboration and smart procurement, we ensure our patients come first without compromising fiscal responsibility.

Tim Miller. Senior Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer at Houston Methodist: Houston Methodist is taking a proactive approach to managing supply costs by focusing on smarter purchasing, stronger clinical partnerships and enhanced use of data. Our goal is to reduce supply expenses by $100 million to $150 million over the next three years while maintaining the unparalleled, patient-centered care for which Houston Methodist is known.

We’re also building resilience into our supply chain. This includes securing strategic contracts, forecasting demand with analytics, and stocking essential supplies in a financially responsible way. Our Consolidated Service Center helps us buy in bulk and maintain reserves of vital items like PPE and IV fluids.

By working closely with physicians, diversifying suppliers and reducing waste and fluctuation, we’re making sure cost control and supply chain strength go hand in hand. These efforts support both financial health and unparalleled care for our patients.

Kim Moon. Executive Director of Supply Chain and Contracting at Tucson (Ariz.) Medical Center: Balancing cost control while ensuring the right products are available at the right time is indeed an essential skill we must all master to stay competitive. TMC’s supply chain team is incredibly proud of our ability to manage costs effectively while providing the community with state-of-the-art medical care. We achieve this by building strong foundations with both the provider community and manufacturers, partnering to offer the best care in Southern Arizona.

Our approach involves a co-management relationship with physicians to drive market share commitments, which in turn ensures best-in-class pricing. Partnering with our GPO to align with purchasing coalitions adds further value. Additionally, we have a robust value analysis process to review all new requests, ensuring patient safety and cost-neutral impacts. TMC’s strategy has proven effective year after year, earning us numerous accolades. We are proud to rank number one in our GPO price index among our peers and to be recognized as best in class by GHX for the past 10 years.

Brian Stuckman, BSN, RN. Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Ancillary Services at MemorialCare Health System (Fountain Valley, Calif.): Mid-pandemic, MemorialCare transitioned to an annual exercise of using spend category inflation projections to set spend savings targets with a goal to “flatten the inflation cost curve” year over year. In addition to supplies and non-capital equipment, we fully support and incorporate indirect/purchased services, pharmacy, IT/technology and capital equipment. Where possible, cost reduction initiatives can no longer be solely based on price savings. We reset expectations to include utilization change or initiative design solely based on utilization improvement. To better support the expectation, we are actively taking steps to advance our analytics support scope to clinical decision support sophistication.

To complement our spend management plan, MemorialCare continuously evaluates upstream supply chain reliability, diversity and risk, focusing on high-risk/critical to healthcare med/surg, pharmaceutical, imaging, lab, and related categories (keeping our doors open, maintaining continuous uninterrupted care for our communities). Where possible, we have addressed by pursuing a multipoint diversity plan that improves long-term supply chain reliability, which in turn, decreases the total sourcing cost over time. Plans may include the full spectrum of actions ranging from RFP based on supply chain resiliency and value (think large scope/fast change) to methodical diversification of local inventory preparedness measures and with partners to provide resiliency that better matches the current and projected state of the category.

We’re also evaluating new compelling spend management and supply chain technological innovations that help us to work more efficiently with less resources at a lower cost. This may mean bringing in the ability to provide specific support and/or services not thought possible prior, but could fundamentally improve the speed at which we bring value to the table in a highly complex, very regulated, reimbursement constrained healthcare provider industry. Recruiting and succession planning are redesigned to resource and leverage the technological shift.

Eric Tritch. Vice President of Supply Chain and Support Services at UChicago Medicine: We have started to really think about the ROI associated with resilience in a new way. Historical reactive approaches to supply disruptions have a lot of hidden costs that aren’t always well tracked. There are a lot of labor hours allocated to this work from operations, sourcing, and clinical teams to review, approve, train and deploy new devices. There are inventory and ordering costs, supplier setup costs, and often the biggest is the higher prices paid by purchasing products on disruption through other channels. When properly framed, investments in proactive strategies around resilience have a strong ROI and so that is how we are approaching resilience as a way to actually lower total cost to serve.

Benjamin Wingfield. System Director of Supply Chain Operations at Arkansas Children’s (Little Rock): At Arkansas Children’s, we have embraced a refocus on the value our group purchasing organization brings us while trying to design a system that remains agile. We are working strategically on more multi-source contracting. This approach reduces dependency on single suppliers, mitigating some risk, while allowing us to still capture competitive pricing. We bring in data analytics and demand planning to ensure we always have the supplies needed to care for our unique pediatric patient population.

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