From Crisis to Resilience: Building Adaptive Healthcare Supply Chains After COVID-19

Healthcare supply chain resilience is central to healthcare service delivery, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that traditional efficiency-focused supply chain models fail during crises, exposing vulnerabilities that compromise patient care and organizational sustainability. This review consolidates existing knowledge and identifies unrecognized patterns in supply chain strategy decisions by examining the shifting balance between just-in-time efficiency and just-in-case preparedness across crisis phases, revealing gaps in frameworks that overlook disaster preparedness as fundamental to supply chain design. The methodology used systematically reviewed English-language peer-reviewed literature published between 2015 and 2025, with concentrated focus on 2020-2025 sources capturing immediate pandemic responses and post-crisis adaptations, accessed through Google Scholar, ProQuest, and Ex Libris Primo databases, applying selection criteria emphasizing healthcare supply chain specificity, pandemic response documentation, and methodological rigor, then filtering sources assessing empirical evidence quality and theoretical contribution before inclusion. Implementation varies by organizational size, location, and existing technological infrastructure, with digitally mature organizations adapting faster than those requiring simultaneous technology adoption and process changes, indicating that supply chain resilience requires sustained pre-crisis investment. First, analysis reveals that healthcare facilities across the United States experienced widespread Personal Protective Equipment shortages during the early pandemic, forcing clinical staff to reuse disposable equipment due to pre-pandemic budget models that prioritized cost-efficiency over redundancy. Second, examination demonstrates that healthcare supply chains comprise a substantial portion of hospital budgets and operate under life-saving demands requiring immediate access regardless of cost, yet most frameworks were adapted from manufacturing and retail without recognizing that supply failures directly impact patient survival, causing catastrophic failure of just-in-time approaches when pandemic-driven patient surges overwhelmed capacity. Third, synthesis identifies that successful post-pandemic adaptations systematically integrate five strategic elements including hybrid just-in-time and just-in-case inventory systems balancing efficiency with redundancy, vendor diversification across geographic and organizational boundaries mitigating single-source dependencies, technology integration such as blockchain transparency and AI-driven demand forecasting, strategic regional alliances enabling resource sharing during localized crises, and contingency planning protocols embedded into routine operations. Based on this analysis, future research should evaluate long-term financial and operational outcomes of hybrid supply chain models across diverse healthcare settings to establish evidence-based benchmarks for optimal resilience investment levels, while prioritizing integration of advanced predictive technologies and regional collaborative networks to transform disaster preparedness into proactive organizational capability.