Information technology and supply chain remain digitally tethered in data science world.
By R. Dana Barlow
January 2025 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
In this accelerated Information Age, you’d be hard-pressed to hire someone without any information technology experience or expertise.
You likely also would expose yourself and your organization to a grave disservice.
Should a candidate applying for a supply chain position within healthcare organizations need IT experience of any kind? Many would respond that this candidate would be remiss not to be familiar with basic databases and relevant software applications. And you as the hiring body would invite some degree of risk to your organization by adding this person to your team based on unnecessary delays to accommodate a learning curve.
But what if you flipped the hypothetical and welcomed a candidate applying for a supply chain position that specialized in IT without having any supply chain experience whatsoever?
Which might you consider more reliable and valuable to your team – a supply chain person with no IT experience or an IT person with no supply chain experience? What’s the value in supply chain hiring someone with an IT background, experience or skills going forward knowing that data and information remain lucrative commodities in transacting business versus hiring someone grounded in supply chain?
As healthcare supply chain operations adopts and implements more automation, business intelligence and “control tower management” strategies and tactics among others, slicing and dicing minimum requirements for employment can be akin to chess moves.
One supply chain executive quipped, “It helps to hire people with an IT background because you can teach them supply chain, which may be easier than teaching IT to supply chain people.”
Not everyone agreed, however.
Matthew Palcich, system director, Resource Analytics, MultiCare Health System, Tacoma, Washington, pondered the question a bit before straddling “both” as a balanced response.
“Hiring individuals who possess the right kind of curiosity, a working knowledge of problem-solving and tools like Excel/SQL, strong people skills and a desire to improve healthcare is crucial in this space,” he said. “Supply chain expertise can be taught, and with advancements in low-code, easy-to-create application development, these skills can also be acquired. These ‘hybrid’ supply chain and analytics professionals, who remain laser-focused on the needs of their customers, tend to generate the best concepts to market.”
MultiCare supply chain leaders, as well as others with whom The Journal of Healthcare Contracting spoke, maintain extensive IT capabilities to manage and streamline their respective consolidated service center, warehouse or multifacility contracting, distribution and logistics operations.
Supply chain executives and leaders must be vigilant about the opportunities and candidates that cross their paths, according to Doug Bowen, senior vice president, Supply Chain Services, Banner Health, Phoenix.
“There is an opportunity for healthcare supply chain teams to better recognize the market value of seasoned IT professionals who bring skills related to system development and analytics,” Bowen told JHC. “In many cases, healthcare supply chain IT teams are supply chain professionals who have good analytical skills and some technical capability, but they often are not individuals who have dedicated their career to this space through education, certification and experience. Investing in the right talent is a key critical success factor.”
Bowen promptly extoled one of his own mores, “Great strategies and great products do not make a great supply chain. Great people make a great supply chain!”
Still, supply chain professionals need to embrace data science to some degree in the contemporary marketplace, Bowen continued.
“To meet today’s supply chain challenges, all supply chain team members need to be citizen data scientists to some degree, capable of generating and analyzing data to make timely and sound business decisions,” he said. “With the introduction of modern ERP systems and self-service analytics, we can put decision-making information in front of the end users to enable personal empowerment allowing for decision-making to move at the speed of business. Banner Health continues to invest in data management solutions that make this possible.”
Steve Downey, Chief Supply Chain and Patient Support Services Officer, Cleveland Clinic, acknowledged that IT has become something of a job requirement in supply chain.
“Many components of today’s supply chain are technical, so I believe technical competence is becoming more and more required in the daily job,” Downey noted. “I do believe you need caregivers that are passionate about service to patients, that can learn supply chain and are interested in the work. I wouldn’t hire an IT professional to just develop commercial supply chain IT solutions unless we had a very targeted business model towards that. Our primary job is ensuring we take care of patients and doing that may require the system to have IT-skilled caregivers.”
Dan Hurry, CSCO, Cincinnati-based Bon Secours Mercy Health, and president, Advantus Health Partners, remained non-plussed.
“I think it could go either way,” he indicated. “I don’t know if I fully agree with that. I think the biggest challenge is having somebody that can be dangerous enough in both aspects of what we do, and which is why in some of our heavier tech solutions we actually outsource [other companies]. We’d rather have people that understand the why and the how we do things and apply technology rather than the other way around. Whether you like him or not, think about how Steve Jobs always looked at his software applications or hardware or anything he looked at from a tech solution. He looked at end-user applicability first and then moved up to the tech, which is why I lean into that sort of model to make sure we understand what we’re doing. I’ve seen models where if you try to just conform to what technology will do, then that doesn’t always lend itself well to application.”