Enablers of resilience in the healthcare supply chain: A case study of U.S healthcare industry during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Healthcare is considered one basic necessity to sustaining life; thereby, assessing the character of a healthy and resilient supply chain can help a nation develop ideas to combat the healthcare crisis. COVID-19 has led to a long-term strain on the healthcare supply chain (HCSC) and has resulted in a lack of basic healthcare necessities. It has become apparent that supply chain disruptions and increased usage has led to a lack of medical supplies needed to provide the proper care to patients. Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) will help to indicate what characteristics contribute to resilient healthcare supply chains. To assess the characteristic of a resilient supply chain, significant healthcare supply chains will help indicate significant characteristics. A case study on the medical supplies’ supply chains is presented. A rank reversal proximity index MCDM method ranks criteria to assist with decision making. The proximity index will reduce the chances of the rank reversal phenomenon that results in incorrect rankings from occurring. Results show that redundancy, collaboration, and robustness are key indicators of a resilient supply chain while, supply chain design, communication capabilities, and supply chain risk management become comparatively less important during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, an unsupervised machine learning tecnique named "cluster analysis" is conducted to group the resilience indicators of the respective supply chain. Through this study, the best way to combat disruptions in the healthcare supply chain due to large-scale pandemics is to share information quickly, reduce reliance on the design of the supply chain, and track the usage of necessary medical supplies. Alternatively, we validated our study by comparing a Preference Selection Index (PSI) to the proposed method.