Data-driven decision making: Informed healthcare supply chain management

With the evolution and incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into so many business models and enterprises, data-driven decision making is assuming an ascendant role among organisational operations. While this work is not intended to negate experiential or intuitive decision making, leaders are encouraged to examine operational decision making through a lens of how experience can be supported by organisationally derived information yielding more effective operational decisions. While experiential learning is beneficial in determining how organisational decisions are being made, data presents why such decisions are made in the first place. More important still, what impact might decisions have on healthcare operations if grounded in ill-informed, ill-defined decision-making processes? Especially within healthcare supply chain operations, decision making should be a collaborative, multidiscipline, multistakeholder process that is best grounded in data-driven approaches. Healthcare supply chain data and analytics can and do provide a valuable framework within which operational decisions should be viewed. Potentially gleaned from this paper will be a perspective relatable to evidence-based analyses permitting the evolution of better-informed leadership decision criteria contributing to tangible organisational resilience, agility and flexibility.