Medline partners with Microsoft to revolutionize healthcare supply chain operations

Northfield, Ill., Oct 16, 2024 -Today, Medline announced it is joining forces with Microsoft to address complex supply chain challenges facing today's healthcare professionals. Their shared goal is to reduce disruptions and enable more focus across all patient care settings. Together, the two organizations are designing an innovative healthcare supply chain resiliency solution built on Microsoft 365 and powered by Azure AI that is easy to navigate, predictive and secure. The solution will aim to leverage AI-generated insights to save time, headaches and hassle while eliminating onerous technology implementation through integrated inventory management.

"Healthcare today is dealing with a crisis of complexity, and Medline exists to make healthcare run better," said Medline Chief Executive Officer Jim Boyle. "In Microsoft, we see a partner who can help us power better informed actions at a lower cost for our customers. This win-win will revolutionize the way we ensure a resilient healthcare supply chain."

The solution, called Mpower™, will plan to tackle some of the toughest challenges in advancing the healthcare supply chain, including:

• Combining customer and supplier data to provide actionable, predictive recommendations for supply chain professionals. Powered by Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI, this transformative, predictive solution will be designed to include features that make current complicated inventory management workflows easier and empower users with proactive recommendations that they can choose to implement. In short, Mpower will aim to ease decision-making so healthcare professionals can focus where it matters most.

• Avoiding expensive, resource-heavy implementations for new technology platforms. Building the answer to these problems on the familiar, secure Microsoft 365 suite of applications will shorten ramp-up time considerably without the need for new, complicated tools or additional hires.

• Powering positive employee experiences. The planned solution will also target to help address the current talent pressures faced by healthcare organizations by making software more helpful, action-oriented and insightful. The intention is not to create heavy reports that require more from over-scheduled professionals; instead, the goal is streamlined suggestions to ease the workday.

Leveraging Medline's powerful vantage point in the industry and its leadership position across the continuum of care, the tool will pull upon the company's superior data to empower better choices for patients-ultimately freeing up valuable resources that can be redirected to patients in all points of care.

"The potential for AI to help alleviate the burden on healthcare professionals is immense, and together with Medline we're helping to address a unique piece of this puzzle - the healthcare supply chain," said Deb Cupp, President of Microsoft Americas. "By combining capabilities of our Copilot and AI offerings with Medline's proven expertise across supply chain resilience and clinical solutions, we will be able to significantly reduce complexity and give providers time back to focus on patient care."

About Medline

Medline makes healthcare run better. Through its unique offering of world-class products, supply chain resilience and clinical practice expertise, Medline delivers improved clinical, financial and operational outcomes across all points of care. Headquartered in Northfield, Illinois, Medline is the healthcare industry's largest medical-surgical product manufacturer, supply chain provider and clinical solutions partner. The company employs more than 39,000 people worldwide and operates in over 100 countries and territories.

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Contact:
Kristi Krasovetz
(773) 251-4762
[email protected]

or

Carroll Henning
(847) 226-0587
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