The Blue Team

CHAPTER 3. Rethinking the Healthcare Supply Chain

Another great start of the day! We were lucky to have a mentoring session with Antler – a global VC that invests in ideas and teams at the earliest stage. Thank you, Andreas Birnik, for all the insights on how to better tackle and focus our approach to assessing the problems in the Healthcare supply chain. We received an overview of all the amazing and inspiring projects in digital health that Antler is backing!

Our second interview of the day was with Thierry Sarda, who has a long experience in the healthcare field, spanning from working in large established companies to investing and guiding SMEs, to working on innovation in startups and accelerators dedicated to healthcare. 

The meeting focused on the fact that the value proposition in healthcare is based on where you treat the patient, and there is a general trend to provide good quality healthcare at home which was accelerated by the COVID crisis.

What is critical is the patient flow heart of the market in healthcare and to understand the value chain. A shift to delivering healthcare at a distance versus the hospital will create a different supply chain with the possibility of new actors  moving into the healthcare supply chain and more focus on pharma needs to reinvent itself- caregivers.

Moreover, the lack of enough caregivers and the complexity of treatments is getting higher and it is becoming more difficult to find a specialist for everything.

More development on the services and the efficiency of the healthcare system needs to be made to prove agility and flexibility. The conversation also touched on startups pivoting during the COVID crisis and the shift to making the supply chain more local, and improving the APIs manufacturing process to make it greener and reducing the carbon footprint. More focus should be put on safety stocks and revisiting the current procurement methods.

We ended the day on a great note, with the pleasure of interviewing Jean-Michel Dabadie, Founder & CEO of Promedeo, an innovative start-up providing supply chain improvements for hospitals and private clinics. Promedeo realized early on that supply chain management in healthcare requires dedicated and skilled people using the right tools, which can be very challenging in a strained hospital setting. Promedeo is providing smart solutions for inventory management, which allows doctors and nurses time to be used more productively. Their value proposition is to act as a connector between the upstream and downstream supply chains in a hospital setting. This implies higher security, focus on traceability and reduced time spent on logistics. Innovative solutions similar to this one, will accelerate the trends towards “home-care” and Healthcare as a service and help solve the escalating complexity of the new supply chain that come with them. Improving the effectiveness of the Supply chain is one of the missions of Promedeo and we are excited to see the improvements!