For the second year in a row, Rush University System for Health has been included in the annual Gartner Healthcare Supply Chain Top 25. RUSH ranked 15th on Gartner’s 2022 list, moving up from its No. 21 ranking last year.
Considered the top honor in the supply chain profession, the list recognizes health systems that “have a high level of baseline maturity in sourcing, logistics, clinical alignment and analytics,” according to Gartner Inc., a global technology and research consulting company. “The purpose of the Top 25 research is not to definitively list all the great things each health system does, but to highlight some standout areas and share what makes them unique.”
“While in years past we have seen an emphasis on cost and efficiency related to capabilities, this year is different,” said Eric O’Daffer, vice president analyst with the Gartner supply chain practice. “Costs are higher and margins are decreasing. The expectation is for supply chains to drive cost savings, while simultaneously adding services and increasing resiliency.”
To create its ranking, Gartner combined quantitative measures of organizational performance and qualitative assessment of value chain leadership and demonstrated supply chain performance to create a composite score for each organization. According to Gartner, the following three traits distinguished the health systems included in the top 25 list for 2022:
- Aligning to increasing financial pressure — Financial pressures are weighing more heavily on health care supply chain leaders than in previous rankings, Gartner found. The company attributes this trend to increased expenses associated with COVID-19 surges and a lack of COVID-19 relief funding, plus rising inflation and the need to invest in technology, people and processes. RUSH supply chain’s robust partnership with clinical teams has allowed RUSH to effectively manage supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic while also continuing to achieve savings targets.
- Sustaining and building risk and resiliency capabilities — Most of the health systems on this year’s rankings are emphasizing risk and resiliency planning and execution, despite growing pressure to cut costs, according to Gartner. The use of technology to manage inventory and replenishment processes gives the RUSH supply chain real-time digital visibility on inventory levels across the organization and enables supply chain teams to efficiently cover a lot of areas while maintaining the proper inventory levels.
- ESG becoming a supply chain imperative — Reflecting the growing emphasis on environmental, social and governance factors in business, Gartner introduced a measure of environmental, social, and governance concerns to its quantitative metric this year. The company found that health systems included in the top 25 ranking were undertaking initiatives such as increasing supply purchasing from diverse vendors and adding goals for their sourcing teams to measure this purchasing.
Reflecting the organization’s commitment to diversity, RUSH supply chain is creating jobs on Chicago’s West Side through a unique partnership with Concordance Healthcare. More recently, RUSH launched a supply chain training program on the West Side to create a pipeline for jobs at RUSH and also to train the local community for jobs in supply chain at other organizations.
“I am so proud of our talented team for their innovation, collaboration and dedication, which has transformed our supply chain into a recognized national leader,” says Jeremy Strong, vice president, supply chain.
