Director of Control Tower Operations Team, Intermountain Health
April 2024 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Garret Hall found his way to healthcare through a government consulting project. He served as an analyst, tasked with evaluating the performance of a global healthcare supply chain. While Hall’s interest in data and analytics had always been present, it wasn’t until he visited his first hospital system in a developing country that the impact of the supply chain system became evident to him.
“Witnessing firsthand the crucial role played by the supply chain in sustaining a healthy population and community care left a lasting impression on me,” Hall said. “I recognized that, without a cohesive supply chain, even the most well-intentioned healthcare systems could falter due to a lack of necessary supplies for patient care. Observing the dedication of clinicians and their compassionate commitment to patients, I discovered a calling to contribute to the effort of supporting my community. It became clear to me that I wanted to play a role in improving systems to maximize support for those in need.”
Today, Hall is responsible for Intermountain’s Supply Chain Operations Control Tower. The Control Tower is a function within Supply Chain Operations that is comprised of forecasting and demand planning, supply distribution strategy, supply disruption mitigation and product implementation management. This function leverages enterprise-wide data and systems to centralize management of Intermountain’s warehouses, optimize their supply channels, minimize disruption, and maximize operations to the most efficient activities. Hall oversees a team of caregivers responsible for these activities within 33 hospitals, 385 clinics and a regional distribution center.
Recently, Intermountain’s supply chain team celebrated the successful centralization of the management of hospital storeroom min/max and replenishment activities. This has enabled increased visibility and response to supply disruption mitigation, optimize their storage to increase the stock percentage, and centralize activity to minimize redundant workstreams.
Through their Control Tower processes, Intermountain has successfully designed and implemented a conversion process that enables them to complete a tiered approach to conversions. “This process ensures we maximize utilization of owned inventory prior to converting to a new product and aligns clinical education and communication in parallel to new item introduction and availability,” Hall said.
Intermountain’s supply chain team has also designed and implemented a strategic channel optimization tool that analyzes various item attributes to determine the most strategic sourcing logic. The tool evaluates these attributes to determine the optimal source to maximize the operations and cost associated with managing and distributing an item. “Leveraging the economies of scale and picking efficiencies of our internal fulfillment center, we were able to identify and implement sourcing logic that drives item replenishment to the most efficient source available,” he said.
Solving complex problems
In today’s environment, global disruptions and inconsistent availability of goods requires healthcare supply chain teams to think outside the box and solve increasingly complex supply chain problems, Hall said. “In the modern age we are both blessed and cursed with the vast amounts of data that we have accumulated in our global supply chain. Identifying where, when and how we apply the appropriate analytics to data to simplify and optimize processes will be an ever-changing process and approach. With many systems and tools to help automate the processes associated with supply chain, we can now leverage the data foundation to begin looking forward as to how we can predict and anticipate the seemingly unending causes to supply chain risks and disruption that are ever-present in even the most robust supply chain systems.”
As the healthcare supply chain landscape continues to evolve, supply chain and organizational strategic alignment, supplier relationships, and investment in data and governance continue to be critical focal points for supply chain teams from organizational leadership.
For supply chain teams to be successful, Hall said alignment to organizational business strategy is imperative to ensure appropriate inventory investments and minimize waste streams that deviate from approved item and asset management outside supply chain strategy. To increase operational effectiveness, identifying and aligning to core strategic suppliers, based on the business strategy, fosters collaboration and innovation driving down hard and soft costs to the organization through a reliable and efficient flow of goods and services, Hall said. This all hinges on data and information availability, which is why investment in data systems and applications is core to a successful and optimized supply chain.
Hall’s individual goals and motivations as a supply chain leader are to constantly evolve, both personally and professionally, and ultimately make tomorrow better than today, “through helping others, giving back, and striving to take advantage of the opportunities for improvement, specifically in the complex space of healthcare supply chain.”