By Linda Rouse O’Neill, Senior Vice President for Supply Chain Policy, HIDA
HIDA has long advocated for stronger public-private partnerships to strengthen the medical supply chain. A recently published Preparedness Playbook, developed in collaboration with the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), marks an important development in this process.
At the first annual HIDA Preparedness Summit in June 2022, executives from medical product distributors and manufacturers met with federal agency partners and identified an opportunity to better coordinate how and when to ramp up and ramp down production for a more cohesive response in the future. This Preparedness Playbook is a tangible result of those discussions. This Playbook was produced in whole or in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response under a cooperative agreement with HIDA.
The Playbook provides insight and guidance for public and private supply chain partners on planning strategies and supports the national preparedness outlines the response framework. It creates a monitoring effort and sets a cadence of regular meetings between federal partners and medical product supply chain leaders. The collaborative process described in this Playbook identifies the key activities of the public-private partnership; the roles of each partner; the triggers for moving to a different phase in the process; a decision-making process to mitigate supply chain disruption, and how to rebalance the supply chain as it returns to normal operations.
Criteria developed by public and private stakeholders are included in the Playbook to help federal agencies determine when the supply chain is in one of three conditions – Steady State (Condition Green), Potential Disruptions (Condition Yellow), or Overwhelmed Supply Chain (Condition Red). Stakeholders would take such conditions into account to coordinate production and distribution decisions during a public health emergency.
The Playbook will serve as a resource for federal, state, and local public health and emergency planners as well as commercial market medical product distributors and manufacturers. Additional audiences include healthcare providers, first responders, academia, and other supply chain stakeholders to inform their preparedness planning and response activities. Furthermore, the playbook will serve to inform training and tabletop exercises for public and private sectors. This playbook is a “living” document, is considered to be non-exhaustive and feedback and input from all audiences is always welcome to help inform future iterations of the playbook and add additional appendices.
HIDA is pleased to facilitate public-private partnerships such as these. Our organization continues to cultivate relationships with federal agencies and seeks to convene events where public and private stakeholders can exchange ideas and best practices.