Turnover in healthcare procurement is not just a staffing issue, it is an existential threat to supply continuity, cost control, and ultimately patient care. Gartner reports that 31 percent of supply chain professionals intend to leave their organization within the next year, and 65 percent of leaders believe the costs of turnover outweigh any potential benefits. Becker’s Hospital Review adds that overall healthcare turnover still averages around 18 percent, with younger staff leaving at even higher rates—38 percent among Generation Z and 22 percent among millennials. For procurement in healthcare, where institutional memory is vital, these numbers dramatize the scale of the risk. The cost is not just in recruiting and retraining, but in the loss of the knowledge that guided past purchasing strategies, supplier choices, and crisis responses.
Procurement decisions are never made in isolation. They are shaped by past disruptions, tested supplier relationships, product launches that succeeded or failed, and inventory tactics that either saved money or wasted it. When experienced staff leave, the rationale behind these choices often disappears. Traditional systems of record will show what happened, but they rarely capture why it happened or whether it was effective. That is the real gap when teams turn over, and it is the gap that creates avoidable risk.
Disruptions make this painfully clear. When a key supplier defaults or a global event delays shipments, procurement teams need to respond instantly. Without the memory of how past crises were managed, every new disruption starts from zero. Time is wasted, costly errors multiply, and patient care can be affected. The difference between an organization that remembers and one that forgets can be measured in lives saved, procedures performed, and millions of dollars in lost efficiency.
The same is true for waste. Healthcare organizations lose significant sums every year to expired products. But preventing that waste is not just a matter of tracking dates. It depends on strategies: how stock was redistributed in the past, which substitutions were effective, and how consumption was accelerated when expiry loomed. If those strategies are forgotten each time a buyer leaves, the same costly mistakes are repeated again and again.
These examples point to a larger truth: procurement strength comes not only from people, systems, or suppliers, but from the continuity of knowledge. When decisions are preserved, measured, and made accessible, new staff can ramp up quickly, respond with confidence, and build on what has worked before. Without that continuity, organizations are left vulnerable to the same recurring problems, paying the price of turnover over and over again.
Traditional systems of record provide facts. They can show that a supplier was chosen or a reorder point adjusted, but they cannot explain why those decisions worked or failed. What healthcare procurement needs is not just more data, but foresight—the ability to connect past actions to outcomes and apply that learning to the next challenge.
That is the philosophy behind Optivian. By capturing the context of decisions and transforming them into an organizational playbook, it turns the knowledge of yesterday into the foresight of tomorrow. Procurement teams that once depended on individual memory can now depend on institutional intelligence, ensuring that even as people move on, the capacity to make smart, resilient decisions remains.
Stay smart. Keep the knowledge alive.