Michael Alkire on COVID-19 response
From The Tate Chronicles: Mike Alkire, President and CEO of Premier · · Healthcare NOW Radio
“During COVID we stood up a coalition of suppliers, distributors and folks from FEMA, HHS, the CDC and the FDA, and we created AI‑enabled technologies for syndromic surveillance to help the government understand what was facing us from a supply chain and technology standpoint.”
On , Michael Alkire, President, Chief Executive Officer & Director at PREMIER INC, spoke about COVID-19 response during The Tate Chronicles: Mike Alkire, President and CEO of Premier on Healthcare NOW Radio.
About Michael Alkire
Michael Alkire, president and CEO of Premier, has discussed the company's evolution beyond its traditional group purchasing organization (GPO) roots into a broader performance improvement and technology-enabled services firm. In a late 2025 podcast, Alkire stated that the company's fastest-growing opportunities are outside its existing customer base, focusing on cost transformation through advisory services and technologies that address labor management, quality, and safety. He emphasized that Premier's goal is to embed performance improvements into budgets and workflows, rather than achieving one-time savings. Alkire also highlighted the company's recent partnership with Patient Square Capital, which took Premier private, saying the move provides access to capital with a longer-term view of investment returns. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Alkire spoke extensively about the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the healthcare supply chain. He argued that the U.S. had become overly dependent on China and Southeast Asia for critical products like PPE and generic drugs, and called for increased domestic manufacturing and greater transparency from the FDA on where supplies are produced. Alkire described Premier's role in creating a coalition of suppliers, distributors, and federal agencies to develop AI-enabled syndromic surveillance tools that could identify COVID-19 symptom patterns at the zip-code level. He also noted that Premier invested in domestic manufacturing of gowns, masks, gloves, and generic drugs to build supply chain resiliency, and advocated for using technology to dynamically allocate critical products during future public health emergencies.