By Linda Rouse O’Neill
In June, HIDA held its first-ever Pandemic Preparedness Summit, bringing together supply chain executives and federal preparedness officials to share best practices from the COVID-19 response and strengthen public-private partnerships throughout the health supply chain. Panels and breakout sessions at the Pandemic Preparedness Summit paired federal partners with industry leaders to discuss mutual challenges and develop solutions to improve preparedness strategies.
Federal partners included these key agencies and programs:
- HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response
- Supply Chain Control Tower
- Strategic National Stockpile
- Food and Drug Administration Resilient Supply Chain & Shortages Program
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
The Pandemic Preparedness Summit was a unique gathering of public and private sector stakeholders for in-depth conversations about preparedness issues. Key topics of discussion included:
- Supply Chain Collaboration: Stakeholders discussed collaborations and partnerships that would support, not supplant, the commercial supply chain. The private sector is scaled to make, source, and distribute medical products to healthcare providers across the care continuum. Federal partners have provided the planning, funding, and prioritization to create a comprehensive response.
- Communication Protocols: Participants built on the foundation of trust and communication developed during the COVID-19 response. Solutions were discussed to better structure protocols to ensure the lines of communication between government and industry remain operational in the future.
- Technology and Data: Public-private partnerships can be enhanced by sharing the right information at the right time. Participants identified barriers to data-sharing that would inhibit future preparedness response.
Key themes of the discussion that emerged from the Pandemic Preparedness Summit were the following:
- Build Sustainable Relationships: The trust and communication built during the pandemic needs to be continued and informal networks and relationships need to be standardized.
- Communicate Production Signals: A metrics-based system should be developed and designed to signal to industry a need to ramp up production on a phased basis. Ideally, the system would consist of three phases which would communicate to industry an anticipated increase in demand for critical medical supplies.
- Critical Product List: Public and private stakeholders should work together to identify producers who have the capacity to meet manufacturing needs of critical medical products at the start of an emergency. Such a database would be kept up-to-date to reflect mergers & acquisitions in the industry, so that the federal government would have a ready list of suppliers. In the event of a pandemic or other public health emergency, these warm production lines could be activated.
Thanks to the conversations begun at the Pandemic Preparedness Summit, HIDA will continue to work with federal agencies to build upon this public-private partnerships. HIDA will develop these issues into action items and priorities. The Summit is helping us create a road map to better preparedness in the future.
Linda Rouse O’Neill, Vice President, Supply Chain Policy & Executive Branch Relations