How AHRMM’s Mike Schiller was able to engage more deeply and collaborate more effectively with his peers and colleagues as they collectively navigated the COVID pandemic.
December 2021 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting
Mike Schiller, senior director of supply chain at the Association for Health Care Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM), said it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of the supply chain during the course of this pandemic.
“Our initial focus was sourcing and maintaining on-hand inventories of PPE supplies,” he said. “Fast forward 19 months later and we are faced with myriad global disruptions of raw and finished goods, surging consumer demand and logistic channel constraints. Raw material shortages in other business sectors may now impact the health care supply chain including semiconductors, resins and top of list concerns regarding the current labor shortages. These are outside the bounds of the traditional materials manager whose primary focus was inventory management, replenishment and reorder activities.”
Raw material shortages in other business sectors may now impact the health care supply chain including semiconductors, resins and top of list concerns regarding the current labor shortages. These are outside the bounds of the traditional materials manager whose primary focus was inventory management, replenishment and reorder activities.
Schiller himself has had to work outside the bounds in launching life-saving programs and fostering an unprecedented amount of collaboration among hospitals and health systems. For this work and more, AHRMM named Schiller as the 2021 recipient of the George R. Gossett Leadership Award at its annual conference in Nashville, Tenn.
The Leadership Award is the highest honor awarded by AHRMM and is given to an individual who has demonstrated an extraordinary level of leadership and professionalism in the field, made significant contributions to AHRMM and advanced the health care supply chain. The award is presented in memory of George R. Gossett, an early president of AHRMM. Gossett envisioned the prominence of resource and materials management in the health care field and championed the educational and professional development of the health care supply chain discipline.
“Michael demonstrates leadership and professionalism in the field of health care supply chain management. His passion and dedication for the field have made him a pivotal player in helping the American Hospital Association (AHA) and its members respond to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Steve Kiewiet, chief operating officer of CCS Medical and AHRMM’s advisory board chair.
Schiller has a background with hands-on experience in the health care supply field in children’s hospitals. His firsthand experience allowed him to lead the effort to develop and implement the AHRMM Learning UDI Community (LUC), a health care collaborative effort, in collaboration with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, to address issues impacting the adoption and implementation of the Unique Device Identifier by developing a common understanding and approach within the health care setting. As senior director at AHRMM, he champions the educational and professional development of the supply chain and resource and materials management discipline.
Navigating COVID’s challenges together
Schiller’s performance during the COVID-19 pandemic and work with the AHA saved lives, fostered the networking of hospitals across the country and provided resources for the field to reply upon during a crisis, AHRMM said in a release. For instance, Schiller played a key role in the launch and implementation of the Dynamic Ventilator Reserve Program as well as developing a repository of vetted non-traditional suppliers offering personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies and services.
Schiller said possessing a first-hand knowledge of the complexities that comprise the health care supply chain, and the supply continuum (raw materials to manufacture to point of consumption), allowed him to engage more deeply and collaborate more effectively with his peers and colleagues as they collectively navigated myriad issues the COVID pandemic presented.
“I am extremely proud of the work the AHA, AHRMM, our members and participation organizations were able to accomplish over the course of the pandemic,” he said.
In March 2020, AHRMM immediately convened the supply chain community through a series of learning community webinars from March through May 2020. The webinars covered pandemic and supply strategies, provider panel presentations, supplier/provider PPE success stories and the exploration of a re-engineered health care supply chain.
When the FDA began issuing Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) opening the door to non-traditional PPE suppliers, AHRMM partnered with a third-party vendor vetting company and conducted a first pass review of these non-traditional vendors. Approved vendors were listed and hosted on AHRMM’s Vetted Non-Traditional Suppliers webpage. “Over the course of a year, we vetted over 1,000 vendors and approved a little more the 400 or roughly 40% of the vendors we reviewed,” Schiller said. “At this time, we were also meeting weekly with the National Governors Association which brought together multiple organizations all engaged in similar vendor review efforts. The result was the creation and development of an industry-wide PPE repository for use by both health care and business leaders.”
In the spring of 2020, the AHA joined hospital and health system leaders at the White House to announce the Dynamic Ventilator Reserve (DVR), a public-private online initiative to track and help distribute available ventilators and associated supplies to areas of the country with high COVID-19 infection rates and hospitalizations. Within weeks of the announcement, the DVR had intake calls with 23 health systems, eventually growing to an inventory of nearly 3,000 ventilators across the U.S. The first request to borrow ventilators was made July 14, and since that time, the DVR has facilitated the successful loan of more than 100 ventilators transported across hundreds of thousands of miles.
The 100 Million Mask Challenge, launched by Providence and expanded by AHA, called on manufacturers, the business community and individuals to facilitate new relationships with hospitals and health systems to produce much needed PPE on a large scale.
Over the course of the pandemic, AHRMM has launched surveys, reached out to its membership and convened key stakeholders through Health Care Learning Communities in an effort to more closely follow the changing PPE landscape, understand conservation, inventory management and stockpile reserve strategies, plus shed light on supply cost/non-labor cost savings opportunities and sharing this information with the health care field.
Schiller said AHRMM continues to be engaged in a number of public-private task forces and acts as a conduit for information sharing between members and various federal agencies and organizations including HHS, FEMA, ASPR and GPOs as to collectively reimagine a more resilient health care supply chain.
Since the pandemic, the importance of supply chain leaders and their teams has only risen in the eyes of C-suite executives at health systems. “AHRMM has and will continue to strongly advocate for the supply chain professional and the role they play in today’s value-based care environment,” Schiller said. “AHRMM’s Cost, Quality and Outcomes Movement emphasizes their unique and strategic role.”
Remaining nimble
Schiller said throughout the pandemic, supply chain professionals did what they always do – “we ensured our organizations and clinicians had the necessary PPE and other supplies needed to sustain outstanding patient care.” Nimble, action-oriented and outside-the-box thinking led to organizations leveraging existing business relationships outside of health care and new sourcing channels. There was collaboration with local and state officials in developing temporary supply distribution and inventory reserve models.
Moving forward, successful supply chain professionals will need to possess a global acumen, understanding how disruptions like raw material shortages, labor, political unrest and more may impact their supply chain. They must remain strategic, reducing or eliminating risk from their supply chains through deeper collaboration with existing suppliers while building relationships with local and community businesses, Schiller said. And they must effectively use technology to augment clinical and supply operations, transforming the surplus data they possess and turning that into actionable data.
“A role for the supply chain leader at the executive level ensures their health care organization is able to successfully navigate the dynamic, patient-centered and globally dependent supply environment that lies ahead of them.”