High Technology Health Care Supply Chains: Issues in Collaboration

Healthcare goods have witnessed an unprecedented growth in past few years, especially in developing countries. Being a prominent supply chain, it has drawn attention of the academia as well as the Industry. Cost cutting is one of the important issues in high technology healthcare goods such as heart stents, dental implants etc. Taking in view of the collaborating aspects in healthcare supply chain, we present the case of dental implants. From material procurement until the delivery end (patient) huge costs are involved which appear in different form from R & D to high technology manufacturing. Apart from the cost minimization, some sensitive areas seeking attention are core competency strength and degree of information transparency. In this paper; we present a few broad aspects of the entire supply chain for dental implants incorporating the prominent characteristics and issues. We also discuss how the collaboration and alliance formation helps in capturing value. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.