The climb of a public health manager expert : John Adlesich on healthcare industry trends: COVID-19 has exposed vulnerability at health care organizations across the globe on critical issues, including safety, equipment, data availability, and infrastructure. Early on, it became apparent that “going it alone,” in terms of depending on an organization’s own supply lines and capabilities, wasn’t possible. This led to ad hoc collaborations, with providers, suppliers and non-health-care companies jumping in to deliver resources and capacity to address the crisis. Successful organizations will build upon this mindset, finding ways to close gaps and innovate with partners that bring unique skills to solve problems.
John Adlesich about healthcare industry trends: COVID-19 tops the Biden administration’s priorities and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Vaccine distribution will dominate the first six months of 2021, with federal effort focused on the expansion of testing, contact tracing, and better public health reporting from states and localities up to the CDC and other federal agencies. Data collection and expanded use of data will be critical to the Biden administration’s ongoing COVID-19 response. The administration proposes funding to states and localities for their public health response infrastructure (including registries, reporting, surveillance, and dashboards). The administration also plans to expand the availability of platforms that ensure patient data security and to expand data use rights to enable use and disclosure for research and surveillance. These actions will accelerate research on effective clinical interventions and treatment pathways, expand patient monitoring, and help public health reporting and tracking vaccine distribution.
John Adlesich thinks that 2021 is a crossroads year for the health industry. COVID-19 focused the nation’s attention on the risks associated with overreliance on overseas markets for critical supplies, drugs, and equipment. As an “easy” answer, some are now calling for manufacturers to produce a plurality of medical products domestically. While added domestic investments and expanded US manufacturing capacity are vital components of a holistic strategy for reliable supply, it will be important to strike a balanced approach—one that includes a domestic strategy, but at its core is about diversifying supply, including raw materials, pharmaceutical ingredients, and finished drugs. Achieving this vision requires a surgical approach, starting with identifying the products that are truly needed in an emergency to ensure there isn’t undue concentration in a single country or region. In our view, that means ensuring three or more global suppliers and at least one US-based source readily available to serve the American people. Assessing risk will require new transparency initiatives, requiring manufacturers of critical products to share vital information with government, including supply sources, centers of manufacturing, redundancy and contingency protocols, etc. And all this new information needs a technology backbone that helps government better track product availability, supply chain performance, and sources of supply to predict potential trouble spots in real time during another emergency.
John Adlesich currently works as administrator at Marquis Companies. His latest healthcare industry experience includes positions as executive director at Powerback Rehabilitation Lafayette (Genesis Healthcare) between Aug 2020 – Jan 2021, administrator at Mesa Vista of Boulder between Mar 2019 – Aug 2020, chief executive officer at Sedgwick County Memorial Hospital between Jul 2018 – Feb 2019, interim chief operating officer at Toiyabe Indian Health Project between Mar 2018 – Jun 2018.