Patient-Focused Network Integration in Biopharma ― Strategic Imperatives for the Years Ahead

"Preface This book started out as an interesting set of conversations with some very insightful and intelligent people. For twenty-five years, I've studied supply chains in almost every industry, including oil and gas, automotive, electronics, industrialproduction, and even financial services. And every time I met with executives, I met with the same statements: "We're different-- you don't understand." But in the end, after spending enough time with these executives, it became clear that the same principles of supply chain management applied. Perhaps a different context, different terminology, but in the end, the same rules applied. When I started dabbling in healthcare, I originally encountered the same sets of objections. "Healthcare is different," Iwould hear, "After all, you have to consider the patient." But as I spent more and more time with healthcare executives, I only rarely heard the patient mentioned in the discussion. More often than not, the discussion focused on compliance, reimbursement, diagnosis-related groups (DRGs), and other terms that had very little to do with patient care. And as I studied the industry more, it became clear that organizations in the healthcare value chain, from the patient through hospitals, wholesalers, throughinsurance payers, manufacturers, and finally research and development (R&D), were not very well connected at all"--

Rob Handfield is the Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management at North Carolina State University and director of the Supply Chain Resource Cooperative (SCRC; http://scm.ncsu.edu). He earned his PhD in operations management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BSc in statistics from the University of British Columbia.
The SCRC is the first major industry–university partnership to include student projects in the MBA classroom in an integrative fashion, and has had seventeen major Fortune 500 companies participating as industry partners since 1999. Prior to this role, Handfield was an associate professor and research associate with the Global Procurement and Supply Chain Benchmarking Initiative at Michigan State University from 1992 through 1999, working closely with Professor Robert Monczka.
Handfield is the author of several books on supply chain management and healthcare, and has published many scholarly articles on the subject. He is considered a thought leader in the field of strategic sourcing, healthcare supply chains, supply market intelligence, and supplier relationship management. He has spoken on these subjects across the globe, including China, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Latin America, Europe, Korea, Japan, Canada, and other venues.