Project N95
The coronavirus pandemic created an unprecedented shortage of PPE, leaving frontline healthcare workers dangerously ill-equipped to protect themselves and their patients from COVID-19. The global PPE demand has overwhelmed traditional medical supply chains, resulting in black market behavior and price gouging. Project N95 built a transparent digital marketplace to help healthcare workers access PPE as quickly as possible.
Project N95 uses an anonymized reverse auction to ensure buyers are receiving the best price through competitive bidding and price transparency. It works like this: qualified buyers submit a Request for Quote, and are matched with product bids from vetted suppliers. Smaller orders from healthcare purchasers can be aggregated to compete for best prices. All vetted products are publicly listed, to include prices and product ratings, to drive market transparency and elevate quality suppliers. If scaled globally, the Project N95 marketplace could bolster medical supply chain resilience now and for future pandemics.
The coronavirus pandemic has broken the global supply chain for critical medical equipment.
Suppliers and manufacturers are out of stock, leaving frontline organizations to find new sources of PPE. The N95 masks are particularly hard to procure; trusted large-scale Chinese manufacturers like 3M are supplying China and other countries also battling the pandemic. New unverified suppliers have entered to fill that void, creating chaos. These untested suppliers ask for payments upfront, presenting extremely high risks for frontline organizations, particularly for smaller, non-hospital providers and those without the procurement resources of larger institutions.
The lack of supply and information asymmetry has created a gray market rife with scams and counterfeit product. Larger health systems and government purchasers are competitively bidding on the same limited credible supply, driving up already inflated market prices. Meanwhile many smaller organizations and those without a budget for PPE are either unable to meet suppliers’ minimum order quantity requirements, or they are being priced out of the market completely.
Between March and April 2020, Project N95 took requests from 7,787 U.S. organizations requesting 333,387,955 units of PPE, with approximately three-quarters of requesters unable to purchase on the current market terms.
Digital marketplace: We connect with qualified buyers over phone or email to discuss their needs, resulting in a request for quotation. Our digital platform facilitates anonymous reverse auctions which send suppliers RFQs where they submit a competitive offer; subsequently, validated frontline organizations receive supplier bids and can transact directly through Project N95. Once the buyer selects an offer, they can use various payment methods to complete the purchase based upon agreed payment terms. The buyer receives a receipt and the supplier is notified to send a shipping tracking URL and expected delivery date.
Transparent feedback loops: Once the shipment has arrived, the buyer is asked to provide product feedback to continue elevating quality products and suppliers. Customer ratings and average product prices per unit based on marketplace quotes are published on our website.
We protect healthcare and other frontline workers by matching procurement teams with vetted suppliers. The Project N95 frontline engagement team works with organizations to understand their needs and handholds them through the marketplace end-to-end. Since March, the team has received and verified requests from over 8,000 frontline organizations from every U.S. state, most territories, and the District of Columbia.
The team collects details to verify requesters as frontline workers, and confirms available funding, urgency, operating status before connecting with qualified buyers over phone or email to discuss product requirements and intelligently source suppliers who can meet the buyer’s requirements. Project N95 facilitates the transaction end-to-end to receive feedback from buyers on supplier performance and to continuously improve end-user experience.
The Project N95 partnerships team has also coordinated with government purchasers of all sizes and dozens of national and state medical associations representing emergency medicine, primacy care, and specialty providers, as well as hospitals, medical group practices, and nursing facilities, to understand and address their members’ critical equipment and sourcing needs. We are working directly with medical societies to test solutions for aggregating smaller purchases into larger orders to achieve better pricing and manage last-mile distribution.
Project N95 provides a free tool for healthcare workers to source vetted critical medical equipment and PPE, freeing their time and resources to focus on treating patients and their communities. The technology-based, people-powered solution tracks national demand for PPE and sources suppliers and products globally to meet real-time need domestically. Project N95 improves the medical supply chain through transparency by publishing average per-unit product prices and customer feedback to elevate quality suppliers, encouraging competitive supplier pricing through an anonymized reverse auction, and limiting purchasers to verified frontline workers to discourage price gouging on the secondary market.
- Pilot: An organization deploying a tested product, service, or business model in at least one community
- A new business model or process
Our goal is to successfully and rapidly match 100% of frontline organizations requesting PPE with high quality vetted supplier-products, regardless of ability to meet payment terms, and bring down the average unit price of PPE.
The primary drivers to achieve the goal are:
- Improved Procurement Practices: The digital marketplace encourages competitive bidding by suppliers, instead of buyers, to bring down overall price.
- Increased Transparency: Black markets thrive on lack of information on products and prices, so we make public the average product prices per unit and customer ratings for all vetted supplier products on our website.
- Collaboration: We have established partnerships that enhance our ability to get a comprehensive picture of frontline needs, accelerate sourcing of products, expedite procurement decisions, support vulnerable communities, and promote adequate supply of PPE and critical equipment.
- 9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
- United States
- United States
- Project N95 currently intakes requests for critical medical equipment from 20-100 healthcare and frontline organizations per day. Since May 15th, we have helped to deliver PPE to protect 11,613 individual healthcare and frontline workers.
- In one year, we will serve as least 8000 total healthcare and frontline organizations in accessing PPE and critical medical equipment.
- In five years, we could scale globally to support healthcare and frontline organizations both domestically and overseas.
Our goal is to successfully and rapidly match 100% of healthcare and frontline organizations requesting PPE with high quality vetted supplier-products, regardless of ability to meet payment terms, and bring down the average unit price of PPE through increased supply and improved market transparency.
We will measure progress by the following metrics:
Percent of frontline organizations matched to an option to purchase PPE (directly or through an aggregator solution)
Number of transactions completed as a percentage of total requests sent to vetted suppliers
Percent of supplier-product submissions vetted (reflecting approved and rejected submissions)
Change in price per unit of PPE
Project N95 has functioned as an all-volunteer team working remotely since launching 3 months ago and provided all services free-of-charge to healthcare workers, frontline organizations, and government entities.
With the COVID-19 crisis likely persisting for the remainder of this year at least, we cannot continue to rely solely on volunteers and need full-time staff to manage operations. Initial funding is needed to implement faster supplier vetting; deploy aggregator strategies to group orders for smaller purchasers; and establish sustainable business operations.
Our goal is to create a self-sustaining marketplace with capability to match 100% of frontline organizations requesting PPE with high quality vetted supplier-products, and bring down the average price through increased market transparency. Suppliers are charged a small transaction processing fee and serve as a direct donation to support Project N95's not-for-profit charitable mission and operations.
- Nonprofit
130 volunteers
Since launching in March, Project N95 has become the leading rapid response, not-for-profit organization addressing the COVID-19 crisis. Powered by an all-volunteer team with expertise in procurement, healthcare, government, and technology, and supported by healthcare leaders like Andy Slavitt, Project N95 is dedicated to removing barriers so that frontline workers have access to the critical personal protective equipment (PPE) they need.
Our work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, and on MSNBC.
Find our current leadership team here: https://www.projectn95.org/about
Project N95 partners with governments, healthcare associations, businesses, and philanthropic organizations to further enable our mission. Partnerships enhance our ability to get a comprehensive picture of frontline needs, accelerate sourcing of products, expedite procurement decisions, support vulnerable communities, and promote adequate supply of PPE and critical equipment.
- Governments at all levels to support their community's PPE and critical medical supply needs
- Domestic Manufacturing to support American retooling and knowledge sharing
- Healthcare associations to understand and address their members’ critical equipment and sourcing needs
- Public health stakeholders to advance thought leadership and policy recommendations
- Businesses to accelerate supplier vetting and delivery of critical equipment to the frontline
- Philanthropy to support equitable distribution of PPE to vulnerable and at-risk communities
- COVID-19 response ecosystem partners by sharing data and best practices to allow PPE supply chains to respond to demand
- Technology companies to support execution of our mission
Our current list of partners can be found here: https://www.projectn95.org/partners
Partnerships & Development Lead