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# Recommendations to Improve Medical Supply Chain
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/recommendations-to-improve-medical-supply-chain/
- Published: 2022-03-08T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T17:35:41.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Drugs, Devices, #legacy-id-D5151311

The National Academies Committee on Security of America’s Medical Product Supply Chain makes seven recommendations for FDA, other government agencies, and other stakeholders to take to increase the resilience of the medical product supply chain. In a [report](https://www.nap.edu/download/26420?ref=fdaweb.com) (purchase or free PDF download) mandated by the 2020 CARES Act, the committee says that serious vulnerabilities have been present in global medical product supply chains for many years.

“To date,” the committee writes, “the primary emphasis of regulatory oversight in the United States has been product quality, with a secondary focus on cost. But as the Covid-19 pandemic powerfully reminded the nation, reliability is also vital to human health.”

The committee developed a supply chain resilience framework with four tiers — awareness, mitigation, preparedness, and response. Its seven recommendations are: 

- FDA make sourcing, quality, volume, and capacity information publicly available for all medical products approved or cleared for sale in the U.S.;
- FDA establish a public database to share the information and to promote novel analyses of the data by interested parties;
- health systems deliberately incorporate quality and reliability, in addition to price, in contracting, purchasing, and inventory decisions;
- the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) modernize and optimize inventory stockpiling management as protection against national and regional medical product shortages;
- FDA and ASPR complement stockpiling with capacity buffering policies to enhance cost efficiency and to improve protection in major emergencies;
- negotiating an international plurilateral treaty with other major medical product exporters to make more effective use of limited global supplies by ruling out export bans on key medical products and components; and
- ASPR and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention establish a domestic working group to examine ways to improve the effectiveness of the final delivery stage within the U.S. of medical product supply chains and to engage end-users in planning for emergency response to medical product shortages.