Anticipation has been building for months around Mpower™, Medline’s new “AI digital control tower” to help make healthcare providers’ supply chains even more resilient.

Now the first group of users is officially cleared for takeoff.

The cloud-based Mpower system, designed in collaboration with Microsoft, is in the process of going live as a pilot over the next few weeks for 10 well-known U.S. healthcare systems that have helped Medline test, troubleshoot and improve the technology since last fall.

In addition to the first two organizations announced as pilot participants in September, the group includes Inova Health System, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, ProMedica, UCHealth and four additional health systems.

Those organizations, representing a broad mix of providers across the continuum of care, will pilot Mpower in a live environment, providing additional feedback on their user experience to help inform any final adjustments before launch. Medline will launch Mpower to its customers in waves starting this spring, with the first of those implementations expected by May.

Mpower was created to support the continuity of care by giving providers a simplified process so they can stop reacting to supply chain disruptions and instead start predicting them before they occur, using real-time insights from AI. Connecting demand forecasts and supply information that Medline has as a distributor, Mpower’s intuitive dashboard provides enhanced visibility to at-risk items. Built into the platform is an AI chat agent powered by Microsoft Copilot and Azure to make it easy for users to ask questions, fine-tune product suggestions to help meet specific criteria and streamline workflows, including clinical approvals.

As Mpower evolves, more functionalities are expected to be added to advance supply chain resiliency, drawing on additional Microsoft Office 365 capabilities, expanded data services and future supply chain efficiencies to give health systems more options when they look to minimize supply chain complexity.

The team behind Mpower can’t wait to see healthcare providers using it to simplify their day-to-day supply chain decision-making.

“Already with our pilot users, we’re seeing some encouraging workflow improvements,” said Brian Wells, senior vice president of sales operations. “This is a major milestone for Medline in continuing to improve supply chain resiliency and to take steps out of the process for all parties. With Mpower, we’re automating more processes and making things less complex so our providers can better focus on patient care and we can better support them. And with Microsoft’s help, we’ve been able to really energize the development process, think outside the box and introduce artificial intelligence in ways that we’re still challenging ourselves to learn about. We’re fortunate to be working with a collective group that brings a lot of thought to the table.”

Simultaneously working with 10 major healthcare systems to shape one innovative solution doesn’t happen every day, Wells added.

“This has been a first-of-its-kind collaboration for Medline,” he said. “We wanted as wide a perspective as we possibly could get with our pilot participants. We needed industry leaders who weren’t shy about telling us what’s good and what’s bad – forward thinkers who were willing to bring their own thoughts to a team environment. And this initial release of Mpower is really the culmination of that.”