If you asked ten supply chain leaders whether they can see, in real time, everything moving through their network right now, most of them would have to say no. That is not a guess. It is the headline finding from one of the largest independent surveys of the field this year.
The Visibility Gap, By the Numbers
Black Book Research published The State of Healthcare Supply Chain Technology 2026 in April, based on responses from 1,335 healthcare supply chain professionals across 1,019 provider organizations, including multi-hospital systems, standalone hospitals, and large multispecialty clinics. The findings support a 95 percent confidence level, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
- 81 % report that their current environment does not provide near real-time visibility across all critical supply domains, suppliers, and sites of care.
- 77 % identify substitute identification and approval as one of the three most disruptive workflow bottlenecks affecting continuity of care.
- 72 % say at least half of their critical exception workflows remain primarily manual.
- 90 % say supply chain now ranks among the top three non-labor levers available to improve financial performance over the next 24 months.
The Real Cost Is Latency, Not Just Waste
Black Book's researchers point to a concept worth borrowing: latency, the delay between when a disruption signal appears and when a team can actually act on it. When shortages are detected late, approvals move slowly and supplier data remains scattered across ERP, MMIS and distributor systems, hospitals compensate the only way they can, by carrying more safety stock, escalating manually and absorbing labor costs that never appear as their own line item.
The result is not simply excess inventory. It is delayed decision-making. And in healthcare, delays can ripple across operations, financial performance, and patient care.
The Boardroom Is Starting to Notice
Eighty-three percent of respondents say executive or board review of supply chain KPIs happens less often than quarterly, even though 90 percent already view supply chain as one of their top financial levers. That gap will not last. Sixty-four percent of board members surveyed expect supply chain technology to become a materially more important investment within two years, and 58 percent say current reporting does not provide enough operational detail to determine whether existing technology investments are delivering value.
As financial pressure continues to mount, leaders are increasingly looking beyond cost reduction and asking a more important question: How quickly can we identify a risk and act on it?
Reducing Supply Chain Decision Latency With Inventory Manager
Inventory Manager helps healthcare organizations reduce supply chain decision latency. By transforming disconnected inventory data into prioritized actions, Surgence enables providers to optimize inventory investment, improve product availability, strengthen resiliency and protect patient care across their entire supply chain network.
Rather than relying on manual reviews and fragmented systems, supply chain, clinical and operational teams gain a network-wide view of inventory coupled with actionable insights that help identify excess stock, prevent avoidable shortages and optimize product utilization across facilities.
By enabling teams to act sooner, Inventory Manager helps providers:
- Optimize inventory investment and reduce unnecessary carrying costs.
- Improve product availability across facilities and sites of care.
- Redeploy existing inventory before additional purchases are required.
- Strengthen supply chain resiliency during disruptions and shortages.
- Protect patient care by ensuring critical products are available when and where they are needed.
Customers using Inventory Manager have the opportunity to recover up to 40 percent of the value of inventory already on hand. That is inventory already paid for, simply identified, redeployed and utilized more effectively before it goes unused.
The Bottom Line
The challenge facing healthcare organizations is not simply a visibility gap. It is the growing cost of delayed decisions. When inventory data remains fragmented across systems, organizations pay for that latency through excess inventory, avoidable waste, increased labor and greater vulnerability during disruptions. Reducing decision latency allows supply chain teams to respond more quickly, make better use of existing resources and build greater resiliency across the network.
Eighty-one percent is not a small gap, and it will not close itself. But it is a decision-making problem before it is a spending problem. Organizations that can turn insight into action faster will be better positioned to optimize inventory investment, strengthen resiliency, improve product availability and ensure clinicians have the products they need to deliver exceptional patient care.