Hospital Catalog Equivalency Search

Hospital supply chain teams are locked inside their own catalog — and when a product is unavailable, back-ordered, or overpriced, finding a clinically equivalent substitute is a manual, time-consuming process with no system behind it. Peer Supply's thesis was that the answer already existed somewhere in the community: another hospital was probably using a functional equivalent. The challenge was making that equivalency findable — fast, in context, and without requiring a procurement manager to leave their existing workflow.

The system had to work against real hospital product catalogs, which are messy, inconsistently structured, and highly proprietary. Matching logic had to surface clinically relevant equivalents — not just price or brand matches — which meant the product needed enough nuance to distinguish between meaningful similarities and surface-level ones. The MVP scope had to be tight enough to ship while proving the core value proposition: that community-sourced equivalency data could reduce substitution time from days to minutes.

Designed a three-stage equivalency flow where the entry point is always the user's own catalog context — never an abstract search bar — and the path from 'I need a substitute' to 'I found one I can order' is contained in a single flow.