Saving more lives, together as a team

Terumo Asia Holdings wins at SBR International Business Awards 2022. 

COVID-19 presented a unique set of challenges for many businesses, especially for those in the healthcare industry as the demand piled up and equipment and supplies started to dwindle. 

Since Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) system is a lifesaving device used to provide cardiac and respiratory support to patients, it has been in high demand in many hospitals as they were gearing up to treat severely affected patients of COVID-19.

Terumo Asia Holdings understood that addressing the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic would be difficult but necessary, leading ramping up of supplies and product training support of their EBS-ECMO system in South Korea and Vietnam in a very short time that won them the Health Products & Services Award at the Singapore Business Review (SBR) International Business Awards 2022. 

With the pandemic straining the healthcare institutions, both rapid ramp-up of supply of equipment and training become an absolute necessity, as ECMO is found useful to treat patients with severe conditions such as those with acute respiratory failure, essentially becoming the last resort to save a patient’s life. Terumo Asia Holdings’ contribution in helping the healthcare institutions with supplies of the EBS-ECMO system and Terumo associates’ relentless effort to stand beside the healthcare professionals through the time of the pandemic by providing product and service training on the EBS-ECMO has been outstanding. Due to the major scarcity in most supply chains around the world, timely and adequate supply was one of the key challenges that Terumo had to address for hospitals in need of the EBS-ECMO systems. Terumo coordinated its members across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore to ramp up production, manufacturing, and allocation of the systems, as the pace of manufacturing that time was not enough to meet the demands at hand. This effort resulted in a 600% growth in quantity supplied, allowing support of an increased amount of demand over the past two financial years (FY2020 and FY2021). 

Installation, product training, and education were another set of challenges that Terumo faced with the rapid rollout of the EBS-ECMO systems to hospitals, as well as limited resources and strict COVID-related travel restrictions. Terumo Asia Holding conducted more than 250 product and service training around South Korea and Vietnam, in an effort to ramp up customer support. At that scale and on such short notice, it took detailed planning, odd hour engagements, and a massive amount of commitment from the team. 

To demonstrate Terumo’s efforts towards their social cause, platforms, where healthcare professionals could learn from each other, were provided and facilitated by the regional team based in Singapore, which helped cross-country healthcare professionals to learn and share their experience in handling COVID patients and treating patients on ECMO and at the same time manage the high influx of patients in their own hospitals. 

Many lives were saved by the relentless effort of Terumo and its team members’ commitment to the corporate social cause. This is a true reflection of how associates across many affiliates within Terumo worked hand-in-hand toward the corporate mission of ‘contributing to society through healthcare’.

Watch the interview below to know more about their winning project: