2027 trends to watch: Supply chain resilience will rewrite healthcare purchasing and partnerships

Healthcare supply chains are entering 2027 with a difficult combination of pressures: tariffs and other trade restrictions, geopolitical conflict, persistent cost inflation, transportation disruptions, and climate-related events.  

As disruption becomes a more persistent feature of the operating environment, organizations are building greater resilience into supply chain strategies, from standardizing purchasing processes and improving internal visibility to reassessing contracts, inventory, suppliers, and sourcing.  

Looking ahead, this will mean balancing immediate disruption response with longer-term efforts to build supply chains that can adapt as conditions change, rather than assuming a return to a stable “normal.” Having the right data can give stakeholders the visibility needed to build that flexibility and help organizations across the healthcare ecosystem spot emerging opportunities.

Rising supply expenses are already squeezing hospitals  

Hospitals are already managing significant increases in the cost of the products they use to deliver care. According to Definitive Healthcare, overall medical and surgical supply costs—including medical devices, implants, and patient-billed drugs, excluding overhead—climbed from $40 billion in 2020 to $57 billion in 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate of 7.3%. The cost burden varies widely by hospital type, with average annual supply spend ranging from $407,000 at rural emergency hospitals to $50.7 million at children’s hospitals.

Average medical and surgical supply costs by hospital type 

Fig. 1 - Data is from the Definitive Healthcare HospitalView product and is based on Medicare Cost Report data. Data accessed September 2026.

Tariffs and other trade measures working their way through the medical supply chain are likely to keep that supply cost pressure elevated through 2027. The scale of U.S. reliance on imports makes that exposure difficult to avoid: the country imported more than $75 billion in medical devices and supplies in 2024 alone, according to an American Hospital Association analysis.

Overall confidence in the U.S. economy is down, too, with just 36% of financial leaders saying they had a positive economic outlook over the next 12 months (down from 42% in 2024), according to a U.S. Bank survey. For many healthcare organizations, that kind of sentiment leads to a more defensive supply chain strategy that prioritizes resiliency and reliability.  

Reliability is becoming part of supplier value

Disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic made supply chain resilience a chief point of investment among healthcare organizations in the early 2020s, and it remains a priority nearly seven years later.  

Recent research from Advisory Board found that 52% of health system respondents said ensuring product quality is a top supply chain objective. Importantly, procurement leaders consider reliability and service performance part of product quality, with accurate order fulfillment and on-time delivery ranking among the key indicators providers use to evaluate supply chain partners.

This prioritization has implications for how healthcare organizations evaluate suppliers in 2027. Price and clinical performance will remain critical, but organizations may place greater weight on a supplier’s ability to consistently deliver what was ordered, when it was promised—and, when conditions change, to execute contingency plans effectively.

That makes supply-side transparency and visibility particularly important. Health systems want to understand where products are coming from and which regional risks they should be prepared to address, and suppliers are likewise working to protect their production and delivery capacity. The U.S. Bank survey found that 62% of organizations with overseas manufacturing operations had made efforts to bring those operations closer to the U.S.

Providers will have to work harder to achieve resilience

When supply chains are disrupted, product substitution is among the first tactics healthcare organizations can employ to ensure continuation of clinical services. But substitution is rarely simple.  

Multi-year vendor agreements, regulatory requirements, specialized clinical needs, and physician preferences can all limit how quickly an organization can switch suppliers or products.

Plus, large-scale, cross-industry disruptions—such as those related to oil and natural gas shortages projected through 2027—can further restrain the viability of substitution.  

These constraints incentivize health systems to lean on group purchasing organizations (GPOs), distributors, and other supply chain partners for assistance in navigating both disruptions and substitution challenges. For suppliers and technology companies that can provide supply chain transparency, flexibility, and continuity, these partners are valuable points of contact for broader deals with healthcare organizations seeking to bolster their supply chains.  

However, many health systems will benefit from first focusing on internal developments to improve resilience, such as:

• Diversifying suppliers for products where a single-source dependency creates significant risk
• Pre-approving alternative products or suppliers where clinical and regulatory requirements allow
• Increasing visibility into supplier dependencies, including manufacturing locations, critical components, and upstream sourcing
• Reassessing contracts to understand exposure to tariff escalation, price adjustments, and other disruption-related costs
• Evaluating total cost rather than unit price, allowing for transportation, lead times, inventory requirements, and the potential cost of supply interruptions
• Strengthening internal purchasing visibility to allow operational teams to identify concentration and spending risks across facilities and product categories  

Life sciences developers are reassessing global supply networks

The same pressures faced by providers are affecting pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, but often at a greater scale due to the globalized nature of these organizations.

For decades, drug and device makers built global supply chains optimized for efficiency, low-cost production, and regional specialization. Those networks can deliver significant economic advantages, but they also create concentrated exposure when tariffs, export restrictions, geopolitical tensions, or natural disasters impact sourcing from a particular region.  

For some of the biggest manufacturers, reshoring product back into the U.S. has been one way to navigate supply chain disruptions.  

The strategically resilient response isn’t bringing every stage of production back to the U.S. While a survey from the Reshoring Initiative found that 36% of manufacturers had reshored or were engaging in reshoring in 2026—largely due to tariffs and geopolitical risks—domestic component gaps, regulatory burdens, and labor availability challenges make full-scale U.S.-based production a nonstarter for many organizations.  

Instead, manufacturers are increasingly evaluating where concentration creates unacceptable risk and whether additional suppliers, manufacturing sites, or regional capacity justify the cost of greater redundancy.  

Several large pharmaceutical companies have already announced major investments in U.S. manufacturing. Eli Lilly, for example, said in 2025 that its U.S. capital expansion commitments had surpassed $50 billion since 2020, including new facilities focused on active pharmaceutical ingredients and drug production.  

Lilly subsequently announced additional U.S. manufacturing investments, including a $6.5 billion active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) facility in Texas and a $3.5 billion injectable medicine and device facility in Pennsylvania. Over the summer, they also announced a further $750 million investment in their U.S. manufacturing capacity in partnership with contract manufacturer Resilience.  

Merck has similarly announced more than $70 billion in U.S. manufacturing and R&D investment beginning in 2025, including new and expanded facilities for vaccines, biologics, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Johnson & Johnson announced more than $55 billion in U.S. investments through 2029, including several planned new manufacturing facilities.

These investments illustrate a broader shift toward more geographically diversified and redundant supply networks. But adding domestic capacity does not automatically eliminate supply chain exposure.

A finished-drug or medical-device facility in the U.S. can still depend on APIs, key starting materials, components, packaging, specialized equipment, or raw materials sourced elsewhere. When those materials are concentrated in a single foreign market—as is the case with protective gloves and other PPE, for instance—domestic investment offers little protection against disruptions.  

Federal efforts continue to prioritize healthcare supply chain resilience

Supply chain resilience is becoming a more explicit federal priority as we head into 2027.  

The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response’s fiscal year 2026–2029 strategic plan identifies securing America’s medical supply chain as one of its four strategic goals. The plan calls for strengthening domestic manufacturing of critical medicines and their components, incentivizing onshoring where appropriate, and improving visibility into supply chain vulnerabilities and dependencies.

The FDA is also continuing to monitor medical device shortages through its Medical Device Shortage List. As of its June 2026 update, several device shortages were estimated to continue into the first quarter of 2027, including certain oxygenator devices, endoscopic vessel harvesting systems, and stereotactic breast biopsy needles.

Strategic takeaways for companies selling into healthcare

As resilience becomes a more critical part of purchasing and partnership decisions, several factors are worth considering in 2027:

• Supplier transparency: Healthcare organizations will need more information around manufacturing locations, sourcing dependencies, production capacity, and lead times to accurately evaluate supply chain risk and make smart procurement decisions.  
• Total cost vs. unit price: Tariffs, freight costs, labor expenses, and other forms of cost inflation make a product’s sticker price an incomplete measure of value. Procurement teams need to understand transportation, inventory requirements, contract terms, and other details—a potential opportunity for suppliers to demonstrate value beyond price.
• Geographic and facility-level intelligence: Understanding where healthcare organizations and suppliers operate can be just as important as knowing to whom they cater their business. Geographic and facility-level details can indicate clinical capabilities, purchasing demand, and potential impacts to supply requirements or production due to regional events and other factors.  
• Disruption goes beyond substitution: Health systems impacted by disruption may be looking for more than replacement supplies. Technologies that improve inventory management, identify purchasing opportunities, or reduce dependencies offer heightened value to providers looking to improve their resilience.  

Supply chain resilience won’t eliminate disruption. But it can change how healthcare organizations prepare for it, including who they choose to partner with.  

The organizations that can connect the dots between market dynamics, healthcare demand, and supply chain exposure will be best positioned to identify opportunities and deliver real value as partners to health systems and other providers. The right data and analytics can help to connect those dots.  

Take a closer look at Definitive Healthcare’s claims, market, and consumer intelligence to see how we can help you find opportunities, deliver effective messaging to the right audiences, and win more business. Book a demo today.