Hospitals Turn to Online Matchmakers to Swap Supplies

Meanwhile, his counterpart at a Lebanon, New Hampshire, hospital was hunting for hand sanitizer.

They turned to The Exchange at Resilinc, a new online trading platform from Stanford Health Care, hospital consulting group Premier Inc. and logistics software company Resilinc.

Miceli and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's Curtis Lancaster posted descriptions of what they needed and what they could trade. They were matched up and swapped 500 of each.

“It gives you some breathing room so you can go track down more supply,” Miceli said.

Resilinc CEO Bindiya Vikal said N95 masks, the most protective type, are the top requested item.

“There are more than 9,000 items that are in various stages of being rationed,” she said, including some medicines and multiple brands of protective gear.

Chaun Powell, Premier’s disaster preparedness head, noted the project also is arranging loans of ventilators, patient beds and other equipment.

The online swaps are a counterintuitive result of the widely reported U.S. medical supply shortages: Hospitals also have some surpluses, due to unexpected private donations, government allocations, shipments ordered months ago finally arriving and declines in patients as virus hot spots shift.

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