How Concordance Healthcare Solutions’ Surgence Platform aims to unify and optimize the healthcare supply chain industry.
Success within the healthcare supply chain industry means efficiently developing, manufacturing and distributing medical and surgical products to ensure that providers have the products needed for delivering optimal patient care. As the pandemic showed, staying connected across the dynamic healthcare supply chain network is fraught with challenges.
The healthcare supply chain faces numerous challenges including a lack of visibility, inefficiencies, and continuous, but hard to predict disruptions. There is also a lack of real-time visibility to consumption and forecasting between trading partners within the industry, according to Concordance. This is due to a lack of solutions that can connect disparate systems and identify aspects of the supply chain such as variability of supply, inventory strategies, and unpredictable consumption rates. This causes an inability to truly forecast supply needs.
In 2022, Concordance commissioned a market assessment to validate the need and found that hospitals and health systems are very interested in a platform that centralizes all aspects of their organization’s supply chain, while simultaneously bringing insights from their trading partners throughout the supply chain to proactively signal and address challenges such as supply constraints. “The lack of comprehensive third-party solutions and offerings in the industry was highlighted by COVID-19,” Concordance Healthcare officials said. “The same market assessment stressed the supplier and distributor interest in inventory and allocation management, and efficient customer demand planning and forecasting, especially in a solution that is fully connected to providers.”
To that end, Concordance Healthcare Solutions recently announced the launch of a revolutionary technological solution, Surgence™, a healthcare supply chain “ecosystem.” It was designed with the intent to fully connect providers, distributors, and suppliers by bringing visibility to healthcare network supply and demand information. Concordance partnered with Palantir Technologies Inc., a leading builder of operating systems for the modern enterprise, to create Surgence.
Impacting enhanced patient care through connectivity
Surgence is designed to provide “unprecedented visibility” into the demand of medical supplies in real time, ensuring a seamless flow of products and ultimately enhancing overall patient care in the process, Concordance officials said. The platform aims to improve the accuracy of decisions and outlook of the future utilizing a variation of AI technologies. Industry partners can obtain a better overall picture of the state of their supply chain, solve challenges faster and proactively plan for the future.
Surgence is a first-of-its-kind platform that integrates all the strengths of the other platforms into one, allowing for a wider range of connectivity across the supply chain, Concordance officials said. Individual data governance allows each organization to share information within the Surgence platform and allows each organization to collaborate with their supply chain partners in a way that allows them to be in ultimate control of their data.
“By giving real-time visibility to product demand signals up and down the supply chain, Surgence establishes a new world of informed, proactive supply chain decision-making. This includes the ability to immediately communicate consumption changes and alert all related parties to these changes,” according to Concordance. “Today, there is a lag in realizing consumption pattern changes downstream which leads to inventory and supply issues upstream. By unifying the supply chain with one source of truth, everyone will be moving in the same direction to provide exceptional patient care.”
Future of supply chain connection
Within the healthcare supply chain industry, companies are being challenged to do more with less resources. There are technologies that currently exist to connect specific components of the supply chain, and Surgence aims to maximize the existing technologies, integrate them, and streamline the information into one comprehensive platform.
“By coming together as an industry to face the challenges of the supply chain, we can utilize the power of Surgence to bring value to each connected member individually and together. Many organizations are working on individual solutions, but these standalone technologies are challenging to connect to industry partners. Surgence solves this by being an agnostic solution for the entire industry,” according to Concordance officials.
Looking forward, Concordance is aiming to unify the industry by continuously onboarding providers, distributors, and manufacturers. “All organizations will receive value by connecting to Surgence, as more organizations connect, each organization will receive exponential value. The industry response to Surgence has been extremely positive,” officials said, with many stakeholders stating that the technology is a much-needed solution for the industry. Favorable reviews from manufacturers, distributors and providers alike are driving the commercialization and adoption of the solution.
To learn more about the Surgence platform or to schedule a demo, visit wearesurgence.com.