The influence of supply chain risk management in healthcare supply chains performance

The challenges imposed by the business environment increasingly obligate supply chains to seek lower costs while maintaining high service levels. Healthcare supply chains face additional challenges since their main indicator is to save lives and provide care, nonetheless, keeping the revenue flow to support the activities. The covid-19 pandemic evidenced that a severe rupture in healthcare chains generates rupture in all other supply chains. In this sense, our paper has the objective of presenting a conceptual healthcare supply chain performance framework empirically validated by structural equation modelling. Our survey data were processed through the covariance-based structural equation modelling method, adopted for assessing the causal connection among the constructs. The paper revealed a relationship of supply chain integration, supply chain risk management, and supply chain 4.0 (antecedents) with healthcare supply chain performance (consequent). The literature contributions of this paper are (i) developing and validating a new scale for each construct; (ii) finding evidence of the causal relationships between the factors; (iii) measuring how the constructs influence the healthcare supply chain performance in both public and private healthcare sectors and providing discussion and tools to improve these results; (iv) this work empirically tested a theoretical framework; (v) the study reveals that the sector (public or private) has a moderating effect on all the constructs. Furthermore, the results of this study help to address some literature gaps identified by scholars having the potential to serve as a guide to organisations that are willing to implement these practices. Lastly, we recommend that HC supply chain managers consider the implementation of robust initiatives regarding SCRM, SCI, and SC40.