Supply Chain Management in Healthcare – Why should organizations adhere to it?
More than ever the healthcare sector is facing huge challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic – the demand has never been greater. The combination of demand for supplies, the pressure to allocate essential goods (such as PPE) from doctor to patient and a decrease of the resources is challenging healthcare executives to think outside of the box and strategically focus on streamlining operations efficiently and effectively while at the same time delivering improved outcomes without compromising quality of care.
Across the supply chain network, we will find up-and-coming technologies with solutions to simplify the complex infrastructure of supply chain management by helping healthcare professionals to identify areas of opportunity for improvement. With all the technological advances over the past decade – EHR, Telehealth, Sensors and Wearable technologies just to name a few – the healthcare operational sector has adapted to the use of technology quite well. Surprisingly though, not all organizations have embraced the use of technology and are still utilizing manual processes and outdated tools.
At ACXSS, we work in tandem with organizations to leverage experience, relationships, contracts, data, and technology to provide instant operational oversight so you can achieve measurable results. ACXSS’ proprietary tool was designed by supply chain professionals in collaboration with healthcare professionals. We have a comprehensive approach to the healthcare industry and its complexities taking into consideration all aspects from people to technology. We sustain a relationship with our members that starts at research and planning and continues through implementation and post-release support and reporting.
ACXSS offers intelligent and data-driven solutions to seamlessly streamline your supply chain process. Our comprehensive suite of solutions includes:
• The Marketplace: All your shopping is done from one single place, by multiple locations and users with our customized single-source multi-vendor, cloud-based ordering platform.
• Complete Dashboard: The Dashboard provides an instant oversight of your organization, uncovering opportunities to improve your bottom line.
• Smart Inventory: Our Smart Inventory tool allows you to enhance your supply chain process by establishing a rules-based inventory ordering system.
• Customized Report: Customized reports allows for real-time spend visibility across all locations with an enterprise to line-item detail.
• Accurate Data & Analytics: Intuitive spend analytics tools to drive business intelligence with real-time price auditing, contract management and compliance, savings analysis tools, vendor management and reporting, and much more.

With over 3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, we all hold onto the hope of finding the drug that can help end the pandemic.
Since the world became aware of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus strain that causes COVID-19, a respiratory illness, scientists and researchers around the globe have been on a relentless hunt for drugs and vaccines to treat the disease.
Vaccination is one of the most effective ways of training our immune system to protect against diseases. This works by introducing a small number of antigens, (a weakened or inactive version of the disease-causing pathogen) so that the body can trigger an immune response to it, therefore, producing antibodies that will fight the virus or bacteria once it re-enters the body.
The development of new vaccines can take years. From initial studies to safety and effectiveness testing, approval to mass production - a vaccine for COVID-19 can take 12 to 18 months or longer to become available. On a positive note, researchers are using past research on SARS and MERS vaccines putting us a few steps ahead on the development of this new vaccine.
Here is where we stand according to the WHO draft landscape of COVID-19 vaccine candidates published on April 26th, 2020. There are 7 candidate vaccines in clinical evaluation:

Non-Replicating Viral Vector Adenovirus Type 5 Vector CanSino Biological Inc./ Beijing Institute of Biotechnology Phase 1 & Phase 2
Non-Replicating Viral Vector ChAdOx1 University of Oxford Phase 1/2
DNA DNA plasmid vaccine with electroporation Inovio Pharmaceuticals Phase 1
Inactivated Inactivated Beijing Institute of Biological Products/ Wuhan Institute of Biological Products Phase 1
Inactivated Inactivated + alum Sinovac Phase 1
RNA mRNA BioNTech/ Fosun Pharma/ Pfizer Phase 1/2
RNA LNP-encapsulated mRNA Moderna/NIAID Phase 1

There are 82 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation, you can access the landscape document here: https://www.who.int/who-documents-detail/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines

ABS Vaccines members find substantial savings on GSK Vaccines through the ABS Vaccines agreement.