EP 53 - Piedmont Healthcare's Ben Haygood on Why Consolidating Vendors Can Cost Patients More Than It Saves Your Org

Ben Haygood built his healthcare supply chain career from the ground up, starting on third shift stocking an ER at 19. Now, as Director of Strategic Sourcing at Piedmont Healthcare, the largest healthcare system in Georgia, he runs a centralized sourcing operation spanning 27 hospitals that has grown from 8 facilities in just 8 years. His perspective on supply chain is grounded in one consistent principle: every sourcing decision eventually reaches a patient.

Ben walks through how Piedmont built its own 300,000+ square foot self-distribution center as a strategic buffer against supply disruption and what it actually looks like to integrate newly acquired health systems without breaking patient care continuity. He also gets into the real tradeoffs behind vendor consolidation, including a pacemaker programming story that illustrates exactly why "fewer suppliers, better price" is not always the right equation.

Topics discussed:

• Building a 300,000+ sq ft self-distribution model to weather supply disruptions

• Keeping acquired facility contracts whole during M&A integration to protect patient care

• Pacemaker vendor consolidation tradeoffs when supplier rep availability affects patient wait times

• Four-hours-sharpening-the-axe data preparation framework for clinician and C-suite negotiations

• Reducing data to binary choices (good/bad) to drive productive stakeholder conversations

• Clinical resource managers as embedded liaisons between supply chain and physician teams

• Why contract metrics and KPIs are "just words on a page" without technology to measure and monitor them

• Conference strategy, including reverse expos as a targeted tool for identifying new suppliers

• Early warning signals on helium and nitrile supply disruptions tied to current global trade pressures

• Upstream supply chain visibility in domestic vs. offshore manufacturing as a real supply assurance factor