Medline recently resumed its Global Health Initiative international trips after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, with employee volunteers traveling to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The group of 11 led a skills-based project intended to strengthen supply chain systems and inventory management protocols for Community Empowerment (CE), a nonprofit organization and Medline partner providing essential healthcare in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Launched in 2017, Medline’s Global Health Initiative seeks to eliminate barriers to care in low-resource settings by leveraging employees’ skills and expertise to improve operating room efficiency, supply chain management and health education.

Improving inventory visibility

In Santo Domingo, Medline built upon a multi-year partnership with CE focused on reducing supply costs by improving inventory visibility. Employees spent the week establishing a new, functional Medline-funded warehouse for CE, conducting inventory counts, updating the organization’s inventory management system, and training staff on procurement protocols to ensure a sustainable solution.

Care providers need the right supplies at the right time to deliver timely, optimal care, especially in resource-challenged parts of the world. Supply chain standardization improves inventory management, and helps organizations to know exactly what they need from donors, while simplifying and expediting procurement.

“We worked directly with CE staff to ensure we were leaving them with a functional inventory and warehousing system that met their needs,” said Jay Bulaclac, senior manager of supply chain optimization, and multi-year volunteer project lead at Medline. “We’re hopeful that with this implementation, CE can operate more efficiently, spending more time with patients and less on inventory management.”

Providing critical supplies

In addition to offering volunteer support, Medline employees transported surgical gowns and drapes, two medical supplies deemed high priority for CE, as part of the company’s product donation program. Between 2018 and 2021, Medline gifted nearly 1,000 metric tons of medical supplies, valued at approximately $13 million, to support healthcare in more than 80 low-resource countries around the world.

To date, Medline employees have partnered with health systems in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, Argentina, Belize and Rwanda to co-create solutions that enable better care.

“COVID-19 shed light on the notion that no country or health system is immune to supply chain havoc,” said Evelyn Miller, senior manager of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) at Medline. “Medline staff provides counsel in the areas of supply chain optimization and perioperative efficiency regularly to our customers in the U.S. It is rewarding to bring those same skills to health systems operating in low-resource settings, all in the name of establishing self-sufficient, sustainable supply chains globally.

Learn more about how Medline is making healthcare run better, everywhere we go.