Graham pinpointed a common error within the healthcare supply industry - the limited scope of resupply. Often, professionals tend to confine resupply to CPAP alone, overlooking an array of other product categories eligible for resupply.

According to Graham, this is akin to "wearing blinders", narrowing potential revenue avenues. Beyond CPAP, lies an untapped and expansive market for resupplies spanning diverse areas such as urology, ostomy, incontinence, diabetes, enteral, mastectomy, TENS, and neb-meds.

Embracing this wider perspective could unlock immense opportunities, allowing businesses to maximize their resupply revenue. Mastering the resupply business isn't a feat achieved overnight, but Graham distilled it down to two crucial elements:. Creating a "Happy Path" : This involves proactively managing each patient's prescription and employing a multi-channel engagement strategy phone, email, and text to ensure a seamless customer journey.

Cultivating a Dedicated Team : To effectively manage resupply, you need a team exclusively devoted to it. Balancing resupply with new orders, setups, or stat discharges often leaves resupply on the backburner. Hence, a dedicated team can ensure undivided attention to this pivotal business segment.

Graham's message from the VGM Heartland Conference is clear - it's time to remove the blinders and see the full potential of the resupply market. By acknowledging the breadth of the market and cultivating dedicated teams, businesses can unlock untapped revenue streams and truly excel in their resupply efforts.

Navigating the dynamic realm of healthcare supplies may seem daunting, but armed with Prochant's Joey Graham's insightful roadmap, you are prepared for the journey. Risk of missed dispensing is generally easier to control than the more consequential risk of a global drug shortage.

Ensuring that both types of risk are mitigated is critically important. A clinical trial supply risk management plan is an approach to preventing or dealing with shortages in drug supply in clinical trials. There are two types of clinical trial supply risk management plans: proactive and reactive.

Proactive risk management plans are initiated months before the trial starts. The goal is to ensure decisions are made that lead to an optimal supply chain and keep risk as low as possible. Creating a proactive clinical trial supply risk management plan requires using the right systems and data to simulate and forecast the trial, th en using the insights gained to optimize the supply strategy.

For example, supply managers may be able to foresee moments in the trial when demand could be higher than expected, and plan to accommodate that excess demand by increasing production in those moments.

Supply managers must strike a careful balance between risk management and waste. While there should always be enough drug to cover uncertainty in demand, calling for too much can lead to inflated costs and timelines. The overage is therefore one of the important outputs of a proactive risk management plan.

A proactive risk management plan should also involve looking at the trial design and identifying points where drug consumption can potentially be decreased with adjustments to strategic decisions such as protocol, manufacturing, kit design, vendor selection, and country selection.

The plan always includes the site resupply strategy, as well as configuring the IRT system in a way that makes it robust enough to tackle uncertainty in demand, reducing the risk of missed dispensing.

Finally, this plan should include an operating procedure for monitoring the trial in order to identify anomalies as soon as they happen and take immediate action to avoid missed dispensing and shortages. Disruptions to the supply chain can be caused by a number of factors, including:.

The typical responses include changing IRT configuration, stopping recruitment, or closing sites — but actioning the latter two responses without careful consideration can delay the trial timeline more than necessary.

Reactive risk management plans can help guide decision-making when problems occur, but this should be the last line of defense. Reactive risk management is not a substitute for proactive risk management, and relying on a reactive risk management plan will typically lead to uncertainty, stress, and long hours for the supply team.

Learn more about reactive risk management plans. N-SIDE has been helping clients create both proactive and reactive clinical trial supply risk management plans for two decades.

Using the N-SIDE Supply App and risk-based optimization techniques , we can help shape your plan around real risk data rather than gut feelings. The N-SIDE Supply App also helps supply managers monitor the trial and compare real conditions to forecasted conditions, making it easier to identify risks and act quickly before they escalate.

With a visual dashboard, you can see abnormalities in the demand, recruitment, and inventory data. You can even receive automated alerts if the real-time data exceeds the maximum forecast.

This type of monitoring can shave months off of reaction times to unexpected events. When an unexpected event occurs that could lead to missed dispensing or a drug shortage, we can use the N-SIDE Supply App to evaluate your response options and choose the approach that will efficiently mitigate the risk while having the smallest impact on the trial timeline.

To do this, we first analyze the source of the risk by determining the likelihood of shortages impacting the trial, quantify the risk, and determine where and when it might happen, what drug types are impacted, and how many patients could be affected.

There are actually hundreds of potential responses to risk in clinical trial supply. We list and prioritize them based on the following variables:.