After listening to Daren Whisman, Director of Financial Operations of Memorial Hermann, a health care organization in Texas, being interviewed on Supply Chain Brain at http://bit.ly/15u3kDL, it caused me to think about the supply chain and logistics affects of the Affordable Health Care Act called commonly Obamacare.
Lets start with supposition that medical and healthcare field is changing. My premise is that it is unlikely no matter what happens that returning to the original process pre-Affordable Care act is likely, because it had become too costly. Affordable Care reflexed a strong emphasis on new direction of health care to wellness. One important avenue to reduce overall health costs, is to encourage people to live a healthier life style.
The supply chain and logistics implications is that healthcare services will less and less be centered on medical facilities such as hospitals and doctors offices to clinics, drug stores, and neighborhood cultural institutions. This will in turn mean more customers, more locations to deliver, more places to determine demand and supply. To those firms in the healthcare business it means a change in business and change in their logistics. Logistics service providers who may not have had to consider healthcare safety issues will now find themselves in this arena.
So as is almost any major change, logistics and supply chain will need to change with it.