Forecasting medical supply demand after COVID-19

Kevin Dubuc (00:00):
Hi everybody. My name is Kevin Dubuc, I’m a senior product marketing manager here at Definitive Healthcare. Prior to coming to Definitive, recently I spent the last four to five years at Cardinal Health working on a variety of their medical supplies businesses, so really excited to be with you today to talk about what I think is a very important topic within the industry right now. With me today is Katie Sakovitz, senior customer success manager. Katie, you want to introduce yourself, a little background?

Katie Sakovitz (00:24):
Sure, absolutely. Thank you Kevin. Hi everyone. Like Kevin said, my name is Katie Sakovitz, senior customer success manager here at Definitive Healthcare. I have been with Definitive Healthcare for about three and a half years, worked with a variety of types of clients, but most recently worked with a lot of medical supply companies, so excited to walk you all through portions of the product today.

Kevin Dubuc (00:51):
Great. Thank you Katie. With that, let’s kick into it here. The agenda today consists of three main things. I’m going to talk through the last 18 months or so of what’s been happening not only within the global supply chain, but also very specific with supply chain dedicated to medical supplies and supplying into the healthcare ecosystem. We’re going to talk a little bit about what’s happening very specifically right now, and then how we think that’s going to impact over the next 6 to 12 months, and talk a little bit about some very specific challenges around medical supplies companies and what many of you are facing as you try to navigate the waters that is the pandemic at this particular moment. Then finally, Katie’s going to come back and she’s going to give us a number of examples of how really the healthcare commercial intelligence that has surfaced from the data platform that is Definitive Healthcare can help you better forecast not only your sales, but also your production planning as we head into the next 12 to 18 months. With that, let’s get into it.

(01:54):
If you’re like me and you’ve spent any period of time in the last number of months trying to fully understand your industry and those that are impacted by the things that are going on in the world, you will no doubt have read some of the headlines that I put on the screen here. I selected just a handful that I thought were particularly… I don’t want to say outlandish, but really grab the reader’s attention, and again, we often know that the headlines can be either misleading or maybe not tell the exact story, but I think what will figure today is once we get through the entirety of the data and some of the stories that I have for you, we’re going to see that the headlines are not exaggerated in any way, and we’ve got some serious challenges ahead of us in this particular industry going forward.

(02:38):
Let’s talk about how we got here. We’ll talk about a little bit of a history lesson. We’ll go back 18 months and get a sense of what happened. In spring and summer of 2020, there were a number of things that happened obviously across the world as the cases in both the US and abroad, it went up. We saw challenges with raw materials, challenges with labor as countries like China decided to lock down the majority of their population, especially in areas that had a significant number of the manufacturing operations for the global supply chain, especially around medical supplies. Again, we saw challenges there. What had happened was, and it was a very interesting timeline of everything, China locks down early, the US and others delayed their, if you want to call them lockdowns or their COVID protocols until later on… .