Liz Cuneo: Why is supply chain visibility and transparency more critical now than ever before?
Ullrich Mayeski: Yeah, that's a great question. The ability to know where in the supply chain a product is at any given time is something that the healthcare industry has long strived to perfect, right? With the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, DSCSA, right, that desire has only been accelerated, right?
And so there are two main issues here. One is there's a patient at the other end of the supply chain, right? Our healthcare supply chain is incredibly complex. Once product has made its way through manufacturers to distributors, and third-party logistics companies and then dispensers, it ultimately goes to a patient. That patient has an expectation and a requirement to get that medication when they need it, and that it meets the requirements that's stated on the label, right?
So, the ability for supply chain partners to have visibility to know where product is in the supply chain is incredibly important for making that process of getting the product to the patient all that much more efficient and to have traceability back through to where that product came from to understand the different, stops that it's had on its journeys.
The other thing is there are cost pressures for the healthcare supply chain. There always have been. And so, the parties that make up the supply chain want to be able to operate their business in the most efficient, timely manner and possible, so that they can make sure that. There are not unnecessary steps in getting that medication to their patient, and they can take the appropriate steps of planning for inventory, making sure that they've got the appropriate logistics routes. All of the things that are involved in this complicated business of moving product through the supply chain.
