Marisa Farabaugh, BS, MBA, senior vice president and chief supply chain officer, AdventHealth
The Journal of Healthcare Contracting (JHC): What’s the most challenging or rewarding project that you’ve worked on the last 12 to 18 months?
Marisa Farabaugh: COVID-19. How can you not call that both challenging and rewarding? From a challenge perspective, we’ve had to re-engineer all our processes around sourcing and even logistics – overnight.
When your traditional resource streams are rocked, the need for supplies and keeping our clinical teams safe doesn’t change. The responsibility for ensuring our patient care and clinical care shifts in a more acute way for us as sourcing leaders to find new streams of resources, or whatever it would be that we’re trying to source.
Going into that was a great unknown. We were used to working with vendors, partners and suppliers who we’ve had relationships with, and we’ve seen their faces and talked to them multiple times and worked through many opportunities and incremental changes over the years. Suddenly, we’re asked and required to reach out to unknown brokers, distributors and people who are friends of people and may know somebody through the hospital and put together purchase orders on new companies. We put new companies in our systems to be able to create a purchase order, then generate a purchase order with very limited information about that organization. We had a vetting process we were using to make sure these organizations were legitimate and real.
I’ve talked about challenges, but there was so much in terms of reward too. We’re in an industry where we believe in helping other people and being a part of something that’s bigger than just profit or margin. We picked healthcare because it connects us. We feel connected to the work that we do, because there are people on the other end of the work that we do. We’re helping people do their jobs to help people.
JHC: What project or initiative do you look forward to working on?
Farabaugh: This season is going to be a part of our world. There’s going to be many organizations that put a spotlight on COVID-19 for a temporary time and then naturally migrate back towards the traditional contracting, logistics way of supply chain that was pre-COVID-19.
But I also think there’s going to be some organizations that say no, this has happened, and it has raised supply chain and the need to know where our resources are coming from, how we can de-risk the model, what we’re willing to do and not do as an organization to give capital or invest in this change, because we recognize that it’s a weak link or if it’s broken, we can’t do what we need to do. So, we’ve got to invest in it and make it stronger.
When you ask about what are the projects in the future that I look forward to in the wake of this, it’s the ability to strategically think about healthcare supply chain in a new way. And I think I know parts of what that means today, but I promise you I don’t know all the parts yet, but I will as the months and weeks unfold and get more time to digest and think about it.
But in this moment, we’re going to think about de-risking supply chain. Does everything come through single channels? How do we think about sole sourcing? How do we think about and know where products are being manufactured? How do we create a risk profile like an investment portfolio?
JHC: What lesson or lessons do you think supply chain leaders will take from the COVID-19 pandemic?
Farabaugh: There’s a silver lining to everything that has happened. It has catapulted healthcare supply chain to the forefront of discussion. Let’s seize this opportunity to make meaningful changes to our industry that have a sustained impact on a stronger supply chain.
Is Just-In-Time the right model? It works in many other industries. But if you’re in food and beverage and you run out of supply, there is not a life at the other end. Whereas in healthcare, you’re taking care of patients. So, is Just-In-Time the right model?
JHC: How do you think you’re better at practicing your profession than you were five to 10 years ago?
Farabaugh: The people are the most important thing. Creating environments and teams that thrive is such a big focus of mine now. Maybe 10 years ago I was more focused on project execution. Today I’m much more focused on how the team is performing. Where are they at? Who’s in what role? How are we going to move forward post-COVID-19? How does our organizational structure change? Do we need additional support in areas that weren’t there before?
My biggest focus has been around relationships with our team and then building a network of relationships both internally within AdventHealth, and externally.
Sidebar:
About
Marisa Farabaugh is senior vice president and chief supply chain officer for AdventHealth. In this role, she is responsible for all aspects of supply chain within the system, including contracting, field operations, data and analytics, value analysis, affiliates program, corporate pharmacy and RxPlus, and corporate construction management.
Farabaugh joined AdventHealth in July 2019. Prior to this transition, Farabaugh held several roles within healthcare supply chain, most recently as the chief supply chain officer for Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. During her time at Wake Forest, she also served as head of the M&A and led the organization through major corporate initiatives including an overhead study. Prior to joining the healthcare industry, Farabaugh worked as an industrial engineer at The Hershey Company in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Farabaugh received her bachelor’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Florida and her MBA from Pennsylvania State University.