ROCHESTER, Minnesota – The Healthcare Industry Resilience Collaborative (HIRC), a non-profit consortium of healthcare leaders focused on improving the domestic supply chain for medical products, today announced that a groundswell of support among healthcare providers has accelerated adoption of the HIRC Resiliency Badge, positioning it as a new must-adopt initiative for healthcare suppliers looking to foster trust among customers and ease their concerns related to supply chain disruptions. This newly launched badging program is now available to medical product suppliers looking to set themselves apart from competitors through their commitment to resiliency within the healthcare supply chain.

To date, more than four dozen provider organizations—including AdventHealth, BJC HealthCare, Corewell Health, Cleveland Clinic, CommonSpirit, Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Medicine, Stanford Health Care, and others—have signed on as members of HIRC, pledging to prioritize HIRC’s standards for transparency and resiliency within their RFP processes and sourcing criteria. The HIRC Resiliency Badge benefits providers by providing confidence that badged suppliers have the capability to deliver critical products reliably. Providers also enjoy added efficiency by not having to investigate and gather resiliency data independently.

“We believe the resiliency badge will foster meaningful discussion for joint improvement in the end-to-end supply chain,” said Jim Francis, CSCO at Mayo Clinic. “The resiliency badge will play an important and ongoing role in our strategic sourcing criteria for critical products. We will also continue to incorporate the resiliency badge’s expectations and standards in business reviews and performance expectations.”

“Prior to this initiative, the healthcare industry has lacked a transparent and credible way to identify high-reliability suppliers, which has meant no commercial consideration is given to resilience today,” said Bill Selles, SVP Supply Chain at Corewell Health. “Every day healthcare providers are forced to use substitute products on little notice, each time increasing the risk of adverse events. We need to reward highly reliable suppliers with greater market share.”

Bill Moir, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain at Henry Ford Health System, said his organization intends to use the resiliency badge as vendor selection criteria. “Vendors will lose business at our organization if they do not demonstrate effective resiliency efforts; the badge is a great way to show this commitment,” he said. “We need to translate the badge into action.”

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