Linda Rouse O’Neill
By Linda Rouse O’Neill
When pandemic or emergency events occur, our industry tends to experience a familiar pattern: product demand spikes, shortages can result, and excess inventory often gets returned or remains unused once the event passes. This can be frustrating for all trading partners involved, but we’re closer to reaching a permanent solution than we’ve ever been before.
Last October, The Blue Ribbon Panel on Biodefense, co-chaired by former U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman and former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, released a bipartisan report positioned as a national blueprint to address gaps in the country’s preparedness plans. In light of recent Ebola and Zika virus outbreaks, the recommendations included in this report are especially relevant for the medical surgical supply chain as they include ideas around personal protective equipment (PPE) and hospital stratification based on the ability to treat infected patients.
Med/surg responds to recommendations
HIDA and the Healthcare Products Coalition, a group of manufacturers and distributors that work on supply chain issues, submitted joint comments for the public record regarding the panel’s recommendations. Five specific recommendations were addressed with potential implications for you and your customers:
- Provide emergency service providers with the resources they need to keep themselves and their families safe. All emergency service providers should be outfitted and trained on reasonable PPE guidelines to prepare for pandemic events. A national PPE strategy would allow your company to better forecast the types and amounts of products needed by your customers in these situations, as well as allow you ample time to provide proper PPE training.
- Establish and utilize a standard process to develop and issue clinical infection control guidance for biological events. Standard infection control guidelines are just as valuable to you and your customers as a national PPE strategy. These guidelines would account for proper training and guidance necessary to prepare for infection containment scenarios, as well as for any product changes that would need to be made to allow suppliers adequate time to meet changes in demand for certain products.
- Establish a biodefense hospital system. During the Ebola crisis, we saw a tiering system for hospitals most likely to treat infected patients. Different tiers received different estimates for PPE products based on patient treatment likelihood, and the system allowed our supply chain to move away from contractual obligations and redirect necessary PPE to these high-tier hospitals. Continuing this work will prove invaluable to our healthcare system as a whole once finalized.
- Develop and implement a Medical Countermeasure Response. Medical countermeasures include vaccines, medications, and medical products your customers need to treat patients during biological events. We recommended the panel think more broadly, however, and consider the planning and response necessary for you to receive and deploy these supplies during emergency events, accounting for labor and training, in order for mass dispensing efforts to be successful.
- Incentivize development of rapid point-of-care diagnostics. We fully support this recommendation, since incentivizing the development of rapid point-of-care diagnostics will provide your customers better data about their patients and will allow both to make informed treatment decisions. These steps would help contain outbreaks when they occur by quickly eliminating false or more common disease diagnoses based on questions or symptoms alone.
The full biodefense report, which you can view online for free, is an important step to establish the framework for improving response rates during emergency events. If you would like more information about this issue or to get involved in the Healthcare Products Coalition, email us at HIDAGovAffairs@HIDA.org.