The growth of the global healthcare supply chain management market is driven by factors such as improved supply chain network of manufacturers, growing pressure in the healthcare industry for cost reduction, rise in the adoption of advanced systems such as GS1 System of Standards, and the Food and Drug Administration's unique device identifier (UDI) system.
Two days before Christmas, a cargo ship left Mumbai with a mask-making machine bound for Illinois-based OSF HealthCare, which will use the equipment to make its own N95 masks.
The past almost two years have left the healthcare industry vulnerable to risks that would otherwise not exist in a pre-pandemic environment. But without the necessary accountability tools for upholding systems that prevent drug diversion in the workplace, a different — and often overlooked — threat is looming. And, with abuse of controlled substances already an issue among healthcare workers, the pressures and trauma the Covid-19 pandemic added to the lives of many clinicians should not go unnoticed, for doing so could result in a decline in patient safety.
For the past 2 years, supply-chain issues have dominated the news coverage, and we appear to be far from a satisfactory resolution. As a result, supply-chain management has become a focus of hospital and other business administrators, as current shortages of drugs and things like crutches replace the dearth of PPE that occurred at the beginning of the pandemic.
This week's announcement by Florida's Broward Health System that the most intimate medical data of 1,357,879 of its patients was breached in the fall should serve as a warning that the healthcare software supply chain will be a juicy target for cybercriminals as we head into 2022, researchers warn.
The healthcare sector's climate footprint is equivalent to an astounding 4.4% of global net emissions. To put this into perspective, if the sector was a country, it would be the fifth-largest emitter on the planet, and responsible for a much larger share than aviation and shipping, despite their reputation.