The COVID-19 pandemic taught the healthcare industry a stark lesson: even cutting-edge medical systems can falter when their supply lines fracture. Shortages of protective equipment, ventilators, and testing supplies hampered an effective response. They revealed structural weaknesses in global medical supply chains that had gone unaddressed for years. While the urgency of that moment has passed, the risks haven’t. Many of the same vulnerabilities remain, and without significant changes, the next crisis could hit just as hard.
Bing Guan, CEO of Jijia Healthcare USA, has spent nearly a decade working in this space, helping governments and nonprofits secure medical supplies and navigate the tangled logistics of global delivery. Long before the pandemic, she was managing procurement under pressure, negotiating around export bans, closed borders, and volatile supplier networks. During COVID-19, that experience became indispensable. Now, with Jijia Healthcare, Guan helps organizations rethink how they plan, purchase, and protect the supply lines that healthcare depends on.
Behind the Shortages: A System Stretched Too Thin
The collapse of medical supply chains in early 2020 wasn’t surprising to those familiar with their design. Built around just-in-time principles and cost-efficiency, many healthcare logistics systems operated with little redundancy and a high dependence on single-source suppliers, often located overseas. This model works in stable conditions. But when international shipping lanes locked up and manufacturing hubs around the world paused operations, there was no cushion. In the U.S., roughly 70% of masks and over half of PPE were imported. As deliveries stalled, hospitals scrambled to protect staff and patients, and some simply ran out.
Guan remembers the urgency vividly. “We had to rebuild the supply chain from scratch while the crisis was unfolding. That meant finding new manufacturers, vetting their quality under pressure, and figuring out how to move goods across borders that were effectively closed,” she says. “We were working with customs, embassies, freight brokers. Every link in the chain needed close supervision.”
Getting essential supplies where they were needed meant organizing cargo flights on short notice, redirecting shipments mid-route, and coordinating across agencies that were themselves stretched thin. Logistics teams were improvising daily, often without reliable information or resources. According to Guan, that period underscored just how brittle the system had become. “There was no playbook. The usual procedures didn’t apply anymore.”
Resilience Is More Than Stockpiles
In the aftermath, many systems turned to stockpiling as a quick fix. But storing more goods isn’t the same as building flexibility. Supplies expire. Warehouses get overlooked. And when the disruption isn’t a shortage—but a mismatch in timing, geography, or regulation—stockpiles don’t always help.
What does help is structural flexibility: diversified suppliers, alternate shipping routes, and logistics agreements that are pre-cleared and ready to activate. Guan emphasizes that the focus is rebuilding the healthcare industry to adapt more effectively. “You can’t plan for everything. But you can design for responsiveness.”
It also means using better tools. Dynamic visibility tools now allow organizations to track inventories, shipments, and supplier capacity with better visibility, improving response times and decision-making. Guan points out that this kind of investment isn’t a luxury anymore. “Companies need to internalize that the potential cost of disruption, financially and operationally, not to mention reputationally. Resilience should be a first-order priority.”
Planning for the Next Disruption
Building resilience doesn’t happen in a crisis. It starts with scenario planning—modeling disruptions ranging from pandemics to cyberattacks to geopolitical conflicts—and designing responses in advance. That’s why Guan focuses much of her current advisory work on scenario planning: mapping out possible futures and designing logistics systems that can pivot quickly. Standards like ISO 22301 offer a framework for business continuity, but they’re only as useful as the commitment behind them.
Technology can help. Predictive analytics and AI are increasingly used to spot risks early and optimize sourcing strategies, potentially offering early warnings, and, in a recent study done by Center for Global Enterprise, saving up to 50% in operating costs.
Guan also stresses the human side of logistics. Technology can flag risks and streamline decisions, but when the pandemic hit, it was partnerships that kept materials moving. Regional procurement alliances, shared inventory platforms, and direct coordination with governments filled the void left by fractured commercial channels. “We need to formalize what worked,” Guan says. “Those emergency collaborations shouldn’t disappear. They should be the foundation for how we operate going forward.”
The New Baseline
COVID-19 was often described as a once-in-a-century event. But the conditions that made it so damaging, ranging from overconcentrated suppliers to lack of surge capacity, aren’t going away. Climate disruptions, tariffs and geopolitical friction are already testing the system again.
That’s the central lesson Guan wants decision-makers to retain. “The urgency we felt during COVID can’t fade into memory,” says Guan. “The old model is too brittle, and we should move forward preparing for anything that might come next.”
What Guan offers is a shift in how organizations approach risk: not as something to avoid, but something to plan for. Through her work at Jijia and beyond, she’s helping address how healthcare supply chains are designed. The pandemic exposed the fragility of our systems; the recovery is about building ones that can hold.
