AI-powered real-time healthcare supplier profile and COVID-19 supply risk matrix

As we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact on global healthcare supply chains continues to mount, leading to widespread systematic uncertainty. For hospitals and health systems such as the NHS, with stretched out resources, the pandemic demand shock and the overall supply shortages represents a monumental challenge that needs real-time risk-adjusted solutions. This means efficient supplier sourcing, supplier selection, and continuous supplier-risk assessment are the most critical tasks for any healthcare buyer, such as hospitals/trusts/clinics.

Within the NHS and other healthcare buyers, the majority of this budget is spent on tier-1 large suppliers with remaining being spent on tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers (medium to low spend). It is this over-reliance on a small set of tier-1 suppliers that exposes the NHS to high risks, as these suppliers are also present in other countries and do business at the same time with other hospitals while managing their limited time-bound aggregate capacity or ability-to-supply.

Moreover, to conduct supplier scanning exercise, the NHS and other buyers follow a manual and outdated process that only surfaces a fraction of global suppliers. This is the primary reason that a concurrent spike in demand due to COVID-19 from within and across the healthcare systems, that led to a total collapse of the global supply chain, leading to heavy shortages for PPE, protective gear, equipment, and pharmaceuticals.

To better prepare the NHS and other healthcare buyers for the emerging COVID-19 wave and to prevent widespread shortages, Vamstar will leverage cutting-edge big data, deep learning and artificial Intelligence to create a real-time healthcare supplier profile and product/service level supplier forecasts, powered by the COVID-19 risk-based framework developed in an earlier research grant. This will help the NHS to maintain an ongoing view of the supply-side dynamics and will provide mission critical visibility into the evolving state of the supply chain on a continuous basis,not just focusing on existing bottlenecks, but also identifying future potential challenges. The project will develop products that can already be used by the NHS during the project lifecycle, but also those that can generalise beyond the project and benefit the wider range of healthcare providers in the longer term.