opinion: canada’s healthcare supply chain is operating blind
4 minute read
without standard barcodes and shared data, nurses, pharmacists and supply chain teams spend hours searching for products, retyping information into multiple systems and manually managing recalls.
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in the operating room, nothing focuses your mind like realizing the item you need is not where it belongs. as a general surgeon who has spent years in health system leadership, i’ve seen how often supply chain problems become patient care problems. yet when governments talk about supply chain resilience and canada-first trade policy, health care is rarely at the table.
this blind spot is costing us: in dollars, in workforce capacity and, most importantly, in patient safety.
canada currently lacks a reliable, end-to-end view of many critical products, from personal protective equipment and medications to implants and ventilator parts. hospitals, provinces and suppliers use different ways to code, track and store data for the same products.
this fragmentation makes it harder to negotiate smart trade agreements, participate in joint procurement or shift product quickly when regions are under strain. it also prevents us from building the clinically integrated supply chain we need, with the ability to track a product from the manufacturer to a patient’s chart.
like the rest of our economy, healthcare relies heavily on global trade, and that requires a common language. many peer countries have adopted gs1 global standards—universal identifiers including global trade item numbers (gtins) for products and global location numbers (glns) for sites. these identifiers act like digital license plates that enable traceability.
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canada is still largely behind in adopting these standards, yet domestic manufacturers already follow these rules to sell abroad. under europe’s medical device regulation companies must use unique device identifiers built on global standards like gs1 to access the european market. canadian exporters comply so their devices move seamlessly through foreign hospitals. yet those same products vanish into a black box once they enter canadian supply chains.
during covid19, local companies in nova scotia retooled in days to make face shields and protective equipment when global supplies dried up. those efforts were heroic, but they unfolded in a system with limited national visibility into what was being made, how much inventory existed, and how quickly it could move to the front lines. we were operating blind.
the same gaps persist today. without standard barcodes and shared data, nurses, pharmacists and supply chain teams spend hours searching for products, retyping information into multiple systems and manually managing recalls. when a medication or device is pulled, it can take days to determine which lots went where and which patients might be at risk. in a crisis, those lost days can mean the difference between a near miss and a tragedy.
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a recent report commissioned by gs1 canada found that fully adopting gtins and glns could unlock up to $2.3 billion a year in labour and non-labour savings. it estimates 12 to 16 million work hours could be freed annually, including about 1.6 million nursing hours redirected back to direct patient care.
the same analysis highlights the patient safety case. medical errors and adverse drug events affect up to 150,000 canadians every year. standardized product identification and tracking could reduce those incidents by as much as 63 per cent by reallocating hours spent chasing product information to hours spent with patients. this represents a fundamental transformation in safety and reliability, while helping alleviate administrative burnout and the effects of workforce shortages in health care.
meanwhile, canada is revisiting its broader supply chains in response to tariffs, geopolitical risk and the hard lessons of the pandemic. we talk about ‘friend shoring,’ reshoring manufacturing capacity and building canada-first strategies. yet health care, one of canada’s most trade-dependent, life-critical sectors, remains on the sidelines, treated like a customer rather than a driver.
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the fix is not glamorous, but it’s achievable. we need regulatory plumbing, not another pilot project. this means mandating the use of global standards such as gtin and gln for all packaged health products and across all health facilities in canada. those standards then need to be a condition of selling into publicly funded health systems, similar to other leading countries.
it will then be key to align provincial digital health and infrastructure investments so that supply chain data flows seamlessly from manufacturer to purchasing organization, then to a hospital inventory system and finally to the patient record.
as a surgeon, entrepreneur and health system leader, i’m excited by artificial intelligence, virtual care and new innovations in health care. yet none will deliver the value canadians expect if we still don’t know, in real time, what products we have, where they are and which patient they touched.
in canada, a chocolate bar can be scanned in any grocery store and we instantly know what it is, where it came from and what it costs. there is no excuse for our hospitals not to match that capability for a chemotherapy drug, an implant or a ventilator part. until then, we are operating blind.
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dr. alex mitchell is ceo and founder of translate health, a strategic advisory firm helping health systems navigate complexity. an experienced surgeon and entrepreneur, dr. mitchell brings deep expertise in supply chain, procurement, and health technology.
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