ENHANCING THE RESILIENCE OF THE HEALTHCARE SUPPLY CHAIN AGAINST PANDEMICS AND BIOTERRORISM
Keywords:
Healthcare Supply Chain, Pandemic Resilience, Bioterrorism Preparedness, Strategic Stockpiling, Digital Technologies In HealthcareAbstract
The healthcare supply chain ensures that critical medical supplies and equipment are available to treat patients during health emergencies such as pandemics and bioterrorism attacks. However, the most recent events of COVID-19 put this system to a test. They found it full of vulnerabilities, leaving gaps in such critical supplies as personal protective equipment, ventilators, and diagnostics. This has very serious consequences for patient care and public health outcomes. It follows that there is a need to carry out comprehensive research to assess the resiliency of the current healthcare supply chain model in developing evidence-based strategies to increase the ability to resist and recover rapidly from major disturbances. It shall aim to appraise innovative practices in strategic stockpiling and distribution of supplies, supply chain diversification, cultivation of public-private partnerships, and leveraging digital technologies to optimize operations. This will build predictive models with historical and real-time data to determine critical supply and demand patterns under varied crisis scenarios. It would also explore blockchain and AI-driven solutions to track supplies, manage inventories, and orchestrate multi-stakeholder responses. This research will involve discussion, interviews, and surveys with key healthcare providers and manufacturers to identify some of the challenges and key success opportunities within this collaboration. An addition of some best practice case studies from other sectors will be reviewed within the study. Based on these results, a set of relevant and targeted recommendations to relevant policymakers and industry leaders is due for their actions to upgrade infrastructures, resources, policies, and cross-sector coordination mechanisms to be better prepared and with more bounce-back ability against future emergencies, ensuring continued access to care.
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