Vice President Strategic Sourcing,
Advocate Health
August 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Adrienne Ainsworth is the enterprise Vice President of Strategic Sourcing with Advocate Health, the fourth-largest nonprofit healthcare system in the United States, including 69 hospitals and over 1,000 sites of care. She is also the Vice President of Advocate Health Supply Chain Alliance (AHSCA), a regional group purchasing organization focused on bringing safe and effective products and services to its members at exceptional value. Ainsworth’s responsibilities include leading sourcing strategy and value analysis for supplies, implants, purchased services, pharmaceuticals, capital, and equipment planning.
Ainsworth also participates in several industry councils including the Milwaukee Anchor Collaborative focused on investing in disadvantaged and disinvested neighborhoods and businesses in the Milwaukee area, and she is a national Board Member of the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM) committed to advancing health through supply chain excellence.
Any recent stories of successful Supply Chain projects you can share?
As part of the Advocate Health Supply Chain cabinet, I have been laser focused on driving clinical quality, governance, and economic value across the new enterprise.
- I successfully led strategic sourcing through the merge of Advocate Aurora and Atrium Health in December 2022, driving over $100 million in supplies, drug, and services annual savings within the first year. Leveraging my experience from the 2018 Advocate Aurora merger, I hit the ground running on day one, bringing together 30-plus Sourcing leaders virtually from Milwaukee and Charlotte to assess and benchmark nearly $2 billion in legacy contract spend within the first week of the merger, identifying immediate synergy savings, and drafting the Sourcing roadmap for the next three years.
- Supporting Advocate Health’s 22,000 aligned and medical staff physicians and 42,000 nurses, facilitating sound enterprise decision making on product and service strategy is both imperative and a substantial challenge. Through a survey of 600-plus key stakeholders, listening sessions with decision makers, and interviews with thought leaders across the industry, the Advocate Sourcing team stood up a comprehensive enterprise value analysis program to support Advocate Health and other AHSCA members. This program shifts the mindset from simply a cost-reduction vehicle to an inclusive, multidisciplinary, clinical/data-driven program for enterprise-wide assessment of new products and formulary opportunities that enhance patient safety and quality, clinical effectiveness, fiscal responsibility, and revenue growth opportunities. The program also leans into innovative technology to enhance supply chain stability and care delivery across the enterprise.
In September, AHRMM membership elected me as a provider representative of the 2024 advisory board. As AHRMM is a critical resource for advocacy and enhancement of healthcare supply chain issues, the advisory board opportunity allows me to serve the broader healthcare supply chain industry in setting strategic direction and influencing the next generation of supply chain professionals to advance health care through supply chain excellence.
What about upcoming initiatives you are excited to be working on?
Supply chain technology is evolving rapidly in the age of generative AI, machine, and deep learning. I’m thrilled to be exploring these capabilities with industry partners to address real-time use cases like acute labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and shifting business priorities. For example, leveraging transaction data, we now can identify the likelihood of a critical item backorder weeks before stockouts occur, enabling our organization to pivot to other products or clinical practices to minimize patient care and operations disruption. From a contracting lens, we are exploring tools that will help identify inherent risks and recommended mitigation strategies within hundreds of existing agreements, enabling our contracting team to better prioritize areas to shore up in the near term, and generate more impactful and risk-averse sourcing events moving forward. These promising technologies will enable healthcare providers to unlock a new level of efficiency and value within the supply chain.
What motivates you as a leader?
The most rewarding part of my work is having the great fortune of working with some of the most talented sourcing professionals in the industry. The level of professionalism, innovation, and high-quality execution within the Advocate Sourcing team is a strategic differentiator within our system. As a leader, building a supportive, empowering team culture requires intentionality and continuous improvement.
What’s the biggest takeaway for you as a supply chain leader over the last few years of marketplace disruptions?
Healthcare is experiencing a period of substantial transformation, managing through headwinds of inflation and global economic downtown, changing reimbursements tied to evolving healthcare policy, growing needs of an aging patient population, a shift of care further down the care continuum, ongoing supply disruption stemming from the pandemic, climate change, and geopolitical conflicts, and a dwindling and expensive labor pool. These factors, among others, have led to a period of mass consolidation of healthcare systems, and an urgent need for rapid cost containment and evolved productivity, while preserving and enhancing patient outcomes. Supply Chain services, now more than ever, is a critical factor in the success (or failure) of a provider’s ability to navigate these challenges. Some examples of SCM solutions include:
- Combining and optimizing system strategies in supplies, capital, drugs, and services through contract enhancement, clinical standardization, optimal inventory management, right place right time pathways, and automation.
- “Tip of the Spear” integration capability – accelerating synergy opportunities in M&A, evaluating and leveraging scale to drive supply savings opportunities to immediately drive down cost and promote enterprise integration.
- Leveraging technology to harness EMR and ERP data to evaluate care variation analytics, facilitating peer-to-peer clinician discussions to share best practices, enhancing clinical quality, patient experience, and affordability.
- Mitigating risk, enhancing response time, and reduce resource burden through supply resiliency strategy and agile inventory management practices and logistics approach.
- Healthcare Supply Chain is a fast-paced, growing industry with successive career advancement opportunities, and many roles with attractive work-life balance benefits. Supply Chain professionals often interface with to the most influential leaders within the healthcare system; this unique platform positions Supply Chain as an “incubator” for young talent interested in expanding to other areas including finance, hospital administration, or quality.
What are the most important attributes of a successful supply chain team today?
Successful Supply Chains have the ability to thrive in an environment of constant change. I have found that an effective Supply Chain directly enhances patient care and clinician efficacy and safety through stakeholder and supplier partnership, bold and innovative program development, and a ceaseless passion for continuous improvement.