Medline moves closer to the age of Mpower™

By Medline Newsroom Staff | June 23, 2025

COMPANY NEWS

Medline moves closer to the age of Mpower™

‘Foundations’ system for supply-chain risk profiling gets an updated name as company prepares to supercharge it with new tool combining AI with the ease of Microsoft 365

Early in 2026, Medline plans to take supply chain resiliency and optimization to never-before-seen levels with the launch of Mpower™, a new “AI digital control tower” for product substitutions, approvals and communications that’s currently being built in collaboration with Microsoft.

The latest step toward Mpower? Renaming the Medline data machine that will feed it.

Supply Chain Foundations, the cloud-based risk-profiling and prediction platform for supply chain disruptions that Medline has offered its Prime Vendor customers since 2022, is now Mpower Foundations™ – a rebrand meant to integrate it more closely with the even more advanced Mpower platform that will draw from it and – its developers believe – substantially enhance it.

Mpower Foundations already takes information that otherwise might be separated across disparate platforms and spreadsheets – things like inventory forecasts, on-hand product quantities and vendor data – and pulls it all together into a set of regularly updating, interactive tools that provide real-time inventory visibility. The system is designed to proactively flag the items most at risk of supply chain disruptions. In response, Prime Vendor health systems can work with Medline analysts to identify suitable backup products in case those disruptions occur, helping to ensure clinicians are never without the supplies they need.

“Rebranding this sophisticated technology as Mpower Foundations allows us to remind not only our current customers but the overall market about the really cool supply chain risk-profiling capability that Foundations gives us – capability that provides the ‘foundation,’ as it were, for the Mpower tool that’s coming,” said Dave Kordik, Medline’s vice president of sales and customer technology solutions.

And what, exactly, is coming?

“Mpower Foundations alone does a fantastic job of prioritizing areas at risk of supply disruptions before they happen,” Kordik explained. “What it’s lacking on its own is an AI component that can suggest product substitutions to health systems and automate workflow. All those suggestions and communications are currently between a Medline analyst and a customer back and forth over email. When we connect Foundations to the Mpower tool itself, that’s when we add on the AI capability.”

And that’s where the real sophistication begins.

Mpower in action: How it’ll work

Imagine you’re a Medline Prime Vendor customer logging into the Mpower cloud interface after its planned launch next year. Already you’ll be benefitting from baked-in convenience and efficiency. Since Mpower is being built on Microsoft 365, there’s no additional software or training needed beyond Microsoft programs most customers already use – namely Outlook and Teams.

Mpower’s design includes searchable dashboards for viewing the data and risk profiles that Mpower Foundations already will have compiled for your specific array of products. But for a faster experience, the interface is being designed to allow you to instead open a predictive Mpower chat “agent,” powered by Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI, and simply ask it what you want to know from its forecasts. For example: “What are my top 10 items currently at risk of not being supplied?”

“In response,” Kordik said, “the AI will mine the inventory and product data and come back with the top 10 items you may want to identify a backup for, with recommendations of alternative products for each based on the most commonly used alternatives nationwide that are readily available for shipment. That information is crowdsourced from thousands of other Medline customer profiles and data attributes – one of the major advantages of the AI.”

Mpower-Chat

A mockup of Mpower’s AI chat agent functionality, which is still in development

What if you want to refine your options? Perhaps you have a clinician preference or contractual issue to consider within your health system. The intent of Mpower is that you simply share these additional circumstances in the chat, causing the AI to adjust and propose something more suited to your situation.

“With the addition of AI, it’s like we’re putting what we have already on rocket fuel,” Kordik said. “It’s not just about the data, but also a very quick, streamlined way to get where you have to get by asking questions to refine the suggestions.”

Now comes the streamlined workflow that puts your choices into action – the piece Kordik calls “the game-changer.” Do you need to obtain clinical approval for product substitutions? Mpower is being designed to automatically generate and send an Outlook or Teams message to your organization’s approvers with all the relevant info to make an informed decision. Leaders will have the ability to approve or reject substitutions easily on their smartphones.

Mpower-EmailExperience

An early glimpse at how an auto-generated email from Mpower might look in your Microsoft Outlook

Once those approvals are secured, the AI then is designed to use Outlook or Teams to alert your Medline support team to put your choices into effect. Later, should a disruption occur that makes one of your products unavailable, Medline shifts to your selected backup automatically – or the backup you’ve picked for your backup. And by having this auto-sub program integrated into your system, you can be confident your procure-to-pay process will remain smooth.

The Mpower technology has now handled the give-and-take to get you to this point, with the intent of saving you valuable time you would have spent on calls or exchanging emails.

“Workflow is a huge gap today,” Kordik said. “Right now it’s very fragmented across healthcare. Our plan is for Mpower to automate and simplify, saving health systems from entering formal requests, data or decisions manually. Customer service doesn’t have to get involved. Medline is effectively receiving a customer’s direction and saying, ‘Got it.’”

What’s next?

Since the announcement of the collaboration with Microsoft last fall, Medline has worked with select healthcare providers to help shape Mpower’s development. A more formal pilot phase begins this summer.

Kordik said he’s already hearing from customers who are relieved someone is creating solutions for the healthcare supply chain by the healthcare supply chain.

And Medline leaders, for whom “resiliency” is a mantra, can’t wait to bring Mpower to life.

“By listening to our customers and their challenges and relentlessly focusing on their needs, we believe we’re building something special with Mpower,” said Marc Phillips, Medline’s senior vice president, Supply Chain Solutions. “Never before have our customers had the ability to so easily navigate their supply chain and enhance its resilience the way we believe they will with Mpower. We envision this becoming an essential piece of their experience, saving them time and costs that can be better allocated elsewhere as we once again reimagine the tools that make healthcare run better.”

Learn more about how Medline can support customers in optimizing their supply chains.

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Categories: Acute Care, Company News, Post-Acute Care, Supply Chain, Surgery Center

Medline Newsroom Staff

Medline Newsroom Staff

Medline's newsroom staff researches and reports on the latest news and trends in healthcare.

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