Senior Vice President of System Supply Chain,
AdventHealth
August 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
As the Senior Vice President of System Supply Chain for AdventHealth, Doug Pytlinski serves as leader over Supply Chain operations across AdventHealth, including acute and non-acute operations, the value analysis teams, and distribution and logistics, which now includes a new Consolidated Service Center (CSC). Pytlinski also leads the Supply Chain strategic sourcing group, which manages the sourcing and contract management for AdventHealth and AdventHealth Supply Chain analytics, reporting and their affiliation program. This work includes more than 50 hospitals across nine states with about $2.5B in supply spend.
What’s are some recent Supply Chain “wins” you can share?
Our new CSC is an expanded asset for AdventHealth that will allow us to build a more resilient process and provide a tool that can help limit the impact of future disruptions through various inventory strategies. We have also teamed up with our distributor partner, Medline, to create something that will address not only the present but will also set our health care system up well for the future. Providers have looked at and done CSCs in the past, though the approach AdventHealth is taking through the partnership with Medline sets AdventHealth up for success. By partnering with Medline, we are building in resiliency with a leading partner in this space. AdventHealth will own the business, strategies and inventory, and Medline will provide support in three key resiliency areas — staffing, inventory backup and transportation. As the AdventHealth CSC supports our 30+ hospitals in Florida, we need to ensure we can perform the services even if something happens to the building, our people or our fleet of trucks.
Value analysis is a key aspect in any Supply Chain, and AdventHealth is no different. This space continues to evolve as we look to various leader and clinical partnerships, process improvement and introduction of tools to help us better assess our clinical products. With the reorganization that took place in the middle of last year, our value analysis team brought our corporate and market value analysis teams under a single structure and leader. This has allowed for a more streamlined process for reviewing, evaluating and implementing work across our system and supporting the contracting teams from a clinical perspective.
At AdventHealth, our people are our greatest asset. It is important that we provide growth plans for our team, offer cross-training opportunities and grow our team members internally as a priority. As an organization that spans the country, we are continually looking for ways to engage with our teams both virtually and in person. Through our annual Supply Chain Summit, we have been able to engage with leaders to ensure alignment on strategies and to look at where we are going in the future. Our latest endeavor is the creation of a formal development program, where we are looking to take internal talent and prepare them for future roles and growth opportunities.
What about upcoming initiatives you are excited about?
I am most excited about three things:
- First, as we partner with Workday, we are designing how our Supply Chain will operate for the next 15 years and beyond. Part of this work will look to align and tighten the processes in Supply Chain across our system, while creating a framework for us to continue to challenge how we mature as a system in this space.
- Second, I am excited about building out our inventory management team and our inventory control tower approach development. This work is all about visibility and allowing our front-line team members to focus on the work at hand, while we have a key group acting as a central resource to monitor and provide our facility teams with key insights into their inventory demands and forecasting. Health systems are full of data, and it is the ability for a health system to tap into this data and make it more usable in a timely and simplistic fashion that can be so impactful. The use of various tools and exploring how AI can help to unleash some of this data are key areas of focus for the inventory management team.
- Third, I am excited about our focus on primary care/non-acute strategy as we continue to align and refine our processes across the system to the “AdventHealth Way.” I am a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan. That team has an approach in how the organization focuses on their work and how they show up each and every day, be it practice, game, community. We are taking a similar approach to ensure that, from an AdventHealth Supply Chain perspective, we are providing the best service and support consistently across our system to support our clinical providers with what is needed for them to best perform their roles.
How do you measure the success of your team and its impact on the organization as a whole?
The success of any team is dependent primarily upon the people. The people on our team are the backbone of all that we do. Having the right people on the team, and the right leaders to guide and grow their team members, is what sets any team up for success. Success is measured by the accomplishment of goals set, by the collaboration of the team to accomplish those goals, and by the leaders on the team who continue to grow and guide their teams to continue to prioritize and accomplish future goals. We have worked hard to ensure we have key metrics in place that measure our impact on service to our customers. At AdventHealth our Supply Chain team members look to ensure our clinical and support teams have what they need to provide exceptional whole-person care to patients.
What’s the biggest takeaway for you as a Supply Chain leader over the last few years of marketplace disruptions?
There has never been a more important or more critical time than now to build relationships with suppliers and with peers to share learnings and leading practices, and to think about refining the way that our industry processes disruptions. Thinking strategically with supplier partners on unique ways to partner and think creatively is critical to the opportunity for improvement of disruption response. We are currently reviewing how we are re-imagining business reviews and creating a more bi-directional and operational discussion that focuses on the current state, along with moving away from the transactional. Interaction with suppliers at our annual supply chain conferences, where we outline our focus and priorities, allows better alignment with where we are going as an organization and is key to ensuring we are all successful and rowing in the same direction.
Supply Chain Chemistry
According to Doug Pytlinski, the most important attributes of a successful Supply Chain team today are:
- Excellent communication
- Cohesiveness of the team, an enjoyable work environment
- Ability to be adaptable and flexible to address changes and ensure we are being pro-active vs. reactive
- Continuous improvement mindset