Supporting Health System Change

Stop saying “it’s proprietary”. Tariffs are on everyone's minds, right? What are boards asking of health systems? What is my board asking for? “Amanda, will you tell us what the impact is and what we're going to do about it?”

Right? What are you going to do? What’s the impact? And every hour, it changes.

So we started doing some research and putting together a framework of trying to answer this question for our board. And in doing so, we felt that understanding the countries of origin was important.

Who knows that better than us? (Because it doesn't live in my ERP; I can't see the network or supply chain.) My partners. So I reached out to a number of my partners. Some of them provided information and said “Keep it super confidential, Amanda, you didn't get it from us.”

I said, “Okay, got it. I won't say I got it from anyone.” I just need that to be able to predict against my general ledger, to be able to predict against my own spend, because this is the question and somebody else says “It's proprietary. We can't say countries of origin.”

My point here is oftentimes you can find a way to answer that question while still protecting your organization and understanding those needs. If you're not doing it, one of your competitors or collaborators is.

When that happens, guess what it does? It's less about the numbers, because that's just a model that it'll go into. But now I've lost some trust in you. That's impacted our relationship because I was able to get it through a different source. And I looked at you and I said, hey, I need this reliability.

And if you don't know it, go back to being transparent. I use this story as a real example just to give you a flavor of the types of things and the conversation.