The COVID-19 pandemic forced factories to shut down, created log jams at ports and left not enough trucks to deliver goods.
Eric Newport, the director of value analysis for Ezkenazi Health, has had to deal with all those things, which have resulted in shortages across the board.
“We definitely spend a whole lot more time these days looking at our supplies on the shelf in a different way,” Newport said.
He said it all comes down to which raw materials are currently in short supply. A shortage of aluminum led to a huge shortage of crutches.
“Recently, it’s been a lot of plastics, plastic-related items, specifically things like blood tubes,” he said. “You can’t treat a patient if you don’t know what their labs are.”
Newport expects the war in Ukraine will only add to the delays in supply chains returning to pre-pandemic levels.
“The estimation of a healthy time period was already in 2023, at least the end of 2022, if not 2023,” he said. “And now you compound that with world events today, it could easily go into 2023.”
Newport said Ezkenazi, which operates a dozen healthcare facilities in the Indianapolis area, has had to allocate its resources due to issues with manufacturers such as Baxter, which supplies IV solutions.
“So as the supply trickles out, they’ll say, ‘OK, for today, we’re going to send out a normal supply,’” Newport said. “‘But tomorrow, because we didn’t get as many manufactured, we may only send out like 90 percent of what the normal supply might be.’”
And like with everything else when supplies are limited, that causes costs to increase. Vizient, which provides health-care data to more than 5,000 health care systems, said costs are up 3 to 5 percent now.
“They’re expecting well north of five percent – as much as seven or eight percent – over the next year or two.”
The lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE, was a big story at the beginning of the pandemic with so much of it being manufactured in China. Newport said one remedy has been moving manufacturing to the U.S.
For now, he has had to adjust his approach to sourcing material. And that means rather than taking a long-term approach, he is taking an almost day-to-day approach to deal with a shortage of supplies.
“It’s not just Ezkenazi, it’s everybody in the market,” he said.
