Post COVID, supply chain outages are affecting every industry, even healthcare. Prior to COVID most health care administrators and physicians did not know the country of origin for most of the medical supplies they use. Many assumed they were made in the U.S. and did not know that supply chains for healthcare supplies are as complex and global as automotive supply chains.
Additionally, patients typically don’t realize that practicing medicine and delivering healthcare services is highly reliance on the medical and testing supplies required. For example, urodynamics is a diagnostic test most often performed in urology, urogynecology, and ObGyn practices or in a hospital setting. Urodynamics uses numerous supplies, the most important of which are the urodynamics bladder catheter and abdominal catheter. Without these catheters, urodynamics cannot be performed. Further, when urodynamics can’t be performed, the related continence care reliant on urodynamics can’t be provided. This can create further issues in the healthcare supply chain. For example, if a patient cannot have urodynamics performed due to a catheter outage, then the potential surgery reliant on the results from the urodynamics test would have to be postponed. This, in turn, may cause over supply issues with the surgery related supplies.
Two of the primary makers of urodynamics catheters, Laborie Medical and Cooper Surgical, have had major supply chain issues which is preventing the delivery of urodynamics catheters to many hospitals and practices. In the case of Cooper Surgical, they are completely out of supply and are stating delivery dates that are many months in the future. Additionally, given where the Cooper Surgical catheters are made, it is likely that Cooper won’t be able to promise any delivery dates with certainty and the dates that have been promised may very well get changed.
Laborie Medical has also had issues with its supply chain, with many smaller practices not being able to procure catheters from Laborie. Laborie has also had issues with replacement components for its urodynamics machines. Laborie appears to have a better handle on their supply chain, but issues are likely to continue for many months.
At BHN, we perform many thousands of urodynamics tests each year. I was a supply chain consultant early in my career and anticipated these supply issues. Due to this experience, we were able to find multiple sources of urodynamics catheters and currently have a warehouse full of catheters. This will ensure that the hospital systems and practices that use BHN to perform urodynamic testing will not miss a beat and will be able to continue to offer urodynamics testing and provide the related downstream continence care.
The supply chain induced outages off urodynamics catheters is a stark reminder to all healthcare administrators and physicians that they need to understand their sourcing of supplies and have a sound understanding of which regions of the world their medical supplies are from. Having redundant suppliers for critical items is paramount in today’s world of pandemics and constant geopolitical risk.
If your practice or hospital is having problems performing urodynamics, reach out to us – we may be able to help. We are assisting many practices already and helping them continue to provide urodynamics and prevent patient care disruptions. As I mentioned previously, we have ample supplies and redundant vendors. Click on the button below if you would like to reach us.