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Abstract
The rising healthcare cost has urged the industry to make significant changes in an effort to offer affordable care to patients. The broad consumer base and policy makers also believe that it is possible to deliver high quality of care, contain cost and improve population health simultaneously. It is under this environment, increasingly, the healthcare industry starts to explore and implement some of the successful supply chain practices that have helped U.S. manufacturing and retailing industries gain efficiency through a plethora of strategical and tactical restructuring and refocus. In this paper, we visit some successful development in the supply chain field that are less communicated in the health care industry. We also review some of the supply chain integration attempts that have been done in the upstream of health care supply chain. Moreover, we introduce the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model that currently has been implemented in many states of the united states and examine how the practice fits the supply chain principles. We also address some of the challenges this practice facing and offer possible solutions for addressing those challenges. The main contribution of the paper is to offer supply chain perspective on the healthcare innovative practice in PCMH.