By Brandon Droz, Vice President of Supply Chain Services, SpendMend
Recently, Strategic Marketplace Initiative (SMI) published the results of a member survey identifying the Top 3 Healthcare Supply Chain Priorities for 2026. The findings are practical, direct, and reflective of where healthcare supply chain leadership is spending its time and attention as cost pressure, complexity, and technology demands continue to rise.
Why SMI’s Perspective Matters
SMI is a unique, non-profit, member-driven community that brings together healthcare providers, suppliers, distributors, and service/technology companies with a shared focus on strengthening the healthcare supply chain in support of patient-centric care.
The organization is built for senior leaders who are actively engaged in shaping outcomes. SMI members work side by side to anticipate challenges, pressure-test ideas, and develop tools and best practices that move the industry forward.
Just as important, SMI creates space for candid, trust-based conversations across roles that are often siloed, including physicians, pharmacy leaders, supply chain, finance, and industry partners. That cross-functional perspective is what gives SMI’s insights credibility.
What Research Revealed
SMI’s survey surfaced three priorities that stand out clearly for 2026:
- Persistent supply-cost increases
Healthcare organizations continue to face sustained cost pressure driven by tariffs, geopolitical disruption, export controls, and supplier concentration. These forces are straining budgets and challenging affordability across the continuum of care.
- Limited supply chain visibility
Fragmented systems and inconsistent data limit visibility into demand, inventory, utilization, and causes disruption. As a result, many organizations are forced into reactive decision-making without the context needed to support clinicians or long-term strategy.
- Technology adoption challenges and AI impact
AI and automation are becoming foundational to supply chain operations, but governance, readiness, and data maturity often lag behind adoption. Without the right structure, technology can introduce complexity instead of clarity.
Cost pressure ranks first, and rightly so. Cost is the most visible and immediate signal. But the survey is equally clear that visibility sits at the center of the conversation.
A Shared View from the Field
In our own day-to-day client interactions and conversations with more than 150 healthcare organizations, we’ve arrived at many of the same conclusions. Cost challenges are rarely misunderstood. What’s harder is understanding why those costs exist; how they behave across the system; and where real leverage actually lives.
At SpendMend, much of our focus has been on uncovering what we refer to as dark data. Information buried in invoices, contracts, utilization patterns, non-standardized processes, and data that exists, but isn’t easily accessible, connected, or actionable. Without insight and visibility into that data, cost discussions stay abstract and technology decisions lack grounding.
These are fundamentally supply chain challenges, so the priorities themselves are not surprising. Without a clear view into the supply chain, spend, utilization, inventory, and supplier performance, organizations are forced to operate on assumptions. Gaining strong visibility replaces guesswork with facts and gives leaders the clarity needed to make informed, defensible decisions.
Why This Year Feels Different
What stands out about this year’s priorities is how clearly they reflect the re-centering of the supply chain function itself.
In recent years, the conversation was dominated by crisis and political disruption response. Product shortages, emergency sourcing, short-term continuity planning, and the need to brace for the unknown took center stage as organizations navigated tariffs, trade uncertainty, and lingering pandemic effects.
Those pressures haven’t disappeared. But operating in uncertainty has become more normalized, the focus has begun to re-center. Leaders are now looking beyond immediate disruption toward reinforcing systems that support consistency, discipline, and long-term performance.
The SMI survey reflects this current mindset. It’s almost as if leaders are returning to the most basic (but ultimately complex) departmental charter, as evidenced by the top 3 supply chain priorities from the SMI survey: 1) Confront cost issues 2) improved visibility and insight and 3) evaluate and adopt the right technology to optimize operations.
At SpendMend, we get it because it’s the same conversation we have with clients every day.
Continuing the Conversation
SMI’s research reinforces what many healthcare leaders already recognize. These challenges are widely shared, deeply interconnected, and increasingly central to organizational performance. The SMI community often reminds us that progress happens faster when leaders work together, share perspective, and learn from one another.
That starts with asking the right questions of our peers:
- How confident are we in our organization’s supply chain visibility today?
- Where are cost pressures most poorly understood across the system?
- And how are technology decisions being guided by insight rather than urgency?
This kind of open, collaborative dialogue is what moves healthcare forward, and SMI’s work provides a strong foundation for it.