Media

Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Hall of Fame to welcome 6 innovators, leaders, pioneers, visionaries for induction this fall

SCHAUMBURG, IL (June 23, 2025) — Bellwether League Foundation's Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Hall of Fame selected six professionals, recognized as innovators, leaders, pioneers and visionaries paving the way forward for their industry and professional contributions and performance, as honorees of the Bellwether Class of 2025. They join 148 earlier honorees inducted since inception of the organization.

Bellwether League Foundation selected the following professionals for the 18th Bellwether Class: George S. Godfrey, Chief Supply Chain Officer & Vice President, Financial Shared Services, Baptist Health South Florida, Miami; Pat Neff Groner (1920-2012), President, Baptist Health, Pensacola, FL, and Co-Founder, Voluntary Hospitals of America Inc. (VHA); Jo Klein (1949-2024), Vice President, Strategic Services, Novation; Michael T. Langlois, Supply Chain Resource, Langlois and Associates LLC; Joni Rittler, retired Vice President & Chief Supply Chain Officer, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; and Claude Trafas (1923-2015), Director of Purchasing, Medical Center of Delaware. Bellwether Class of 2025 honorees will be inducted at the 18th Annual Bellwether League Foundation Induction & Recognition Event (BLFIRE), scheduled for Monday, November 10, at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.

Bellwether League Foundation selected these professionals for their achievements and contributions in the delivery of quality care through efficient and innovative supply chain operations. They represent creative thinkers who take the initiative, expand the boundaries of what's possible, and perform in a way that improves and promotes the profession of supply chain management among hospitals and other healthcare provider organizations, group purchasing organizations (GPOs), product manufacturers and distributors, consulting firms, academic/educational institutions and media properties.

Barbara Strain, Bellwether Class of 2021, Board Chairman, Bellwether League Foundation, saluted the newest Bellwether Class of Honorees for "their well-earned career accomplishments in healthcare supply chain leadership befitting their Hall of Fame induction and recognition." This year, BLF added a "Pioneer" designation to honor those whose career and contributions spanned a foundational period in healthcare supply chain from the early to mid-20th century.

"We congratulate George, Pat, Jo, Mike, Joni and Claude — all six Hall of Famers in the Bellwether Class of 2025 — for their unique contributions that have shone the beacon of light to lead the way for others to achieve supply chain performance excellence," Strain said.

Bellwether Class of 2025

George Godfrey never met a challenge, obstacle or problem that he — or in tandem with this team — couldn't solve — whether using simple communication, alternative, atypical sourcing or complex technology. For example, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, he tapped a manufacturer that made airbags and seatbelts for automobiles to produce durably reusable and sustainable gowns. With his organization's innovation team, he worked with an existing sales platform to facilitate and enable improved communication and match exception via an application that his organization now markets externally as a revenue source. Within his southeastern integrated delivery network (IDN), clinicians and administrators alike know that he is their proven and trusted go-to team leader to get things done.

Pat Neff Groner deservedly earned the tribute, "a man of ideas and action," past the midway point of his career based on all that he had accomplished by that time — and he still had more years to go. After all, he led and innovated a hospital at a relatively young age for an administrator in 1950 (he was 30), co-founded a healthcare research institute in the mid-1950s, co-founded a leading group purchasing organization (GPO) with a small group of hospital administrators he recruited in 1973, and then graduated to a leadership role in higher education. In fact, the GPO he spearheaded as a vehicle to empower nonprofit and not-for-profit healthcare organizations grew to become the largest GPO today in terms of membership, participation, purchasing volume and services. His pioneering expertise touched academia, administration, assisted living, insurance, supply chain, surgical services, technological development and venture research.

Jo Klein represented the style and type of supply chain executive that involved rolling up sleeves and plunging headfirst into investigating and researching how purchasers and suppliers transacted business, and exploring how the complex marketplace worked both collaboratively and competitively to advance progressive thinking while reinforcing high-quality patient care service. Through her GPO roots Klein forged ties with academia, clinical service, distribution, finance and manufacturing to establish and solidify participant activity in a high-stakes exercise that meant the difference between life and death, success and failure. Through her pioneering efforts, Klein cemented educational and informational connections between academia and business, emphasized the features and benefits of supply chain data standards and extolled the virtues of evidence-based analysis and decision-making. Along the way, Klein engaged and nurtured countless professional relationships, and in retirement, translated all of her attributes and qualities into Parkinson's research, earning her the well-deserved nickname "Alpha Chick" by her friends in the Dallas Area Parkinson's Society for her dedicated, devoted, disciplined, methodical, purpose-driven and results-oriented service.

Michael T. Langlois spent his supply chain career consistently swimming upstream against the tide of status quo, emphasizing value analysis as an essential component of supply chain performance excellence that included the critical engagement of clinicians — physicians and nurses — to keep the product and service pipeline flowing and fluid. To wit, he developed a simulation application that enabled supply chain team members to practice engagement strategy scenarios and perform role-playing exercises to work with clinicians in product and service assessments and decisions. Langlois has guided supply chain operations through organizational mergers, foundational self-distribution modeling and consolidated service center development. He even launched a GPO to service merged IDNs and participated early on in the formation of the forerunner to Strategic Marketplace Initiative, building communication bridges between healthcare supply chain executives and leaders with those in other industry sectors.

Joni Rittler didn’t just conceive, create, develop, launch and oversee a consolidated service center for the largest children’s hospital in Pennsylvania, but also for the local economy and population base of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. As the healthcare organization expanded its community reach and footprint, Rittler maintained steady-as-she-goes supply chain service, building trust with clinicians that had experienced service failures in the past before her arrival. When Rittler came on board, she immediately embarked on turning around the organization’s supply chain enterprise, from switching enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to implementing procurement software to establishing the CSC that used local and minority-owned businesses for a variety of service contracts. Rittler shared her experience and expertise as a mentoring leader within the Children’s Hospital Association, educating other hospital executives with valuable insights on performance improvement initiatives. She also established a family fund to support the education and development of supply chain professionals.

Claude Trafas embodied the traditional bread-and-butter, meat-and-potatoes, no- nonsense supply chain fundamentals that made him such an influential and foundational leader from the 1950s through the 1980s. Much of his personal and professional scruples and work ethic was honed during his extensive combat, intelligence and recon experience in World War II, which cost him a limb. Trafas was a staunch and vocal advocate for centralizing the materials management function so that it operated like an actual business, a philosophy that was germinating and simmering just below the surface of standard practice. He was instrumental in promoting the blossoming GPO industry in the 1970s, founding the first statewide purchasing and group purchasing associations in Delaware. He extolled an ethical hard line on supply chain conduct, urging hospitals to maintain their commitments to GPOs if they committed to one and not negotiate better deals on their own or cherry pick to improve bottom-line performance.

About Bellwether League Foundation

Bellwether League Foundation™ (BLF) is an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit charitable foundation that offers programs to educate, endow and evaluate professionals in healthcare supply chain performance excellence. BLF accomplishes this through its primary operation, the Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Hall of Fame™, its growing philanthropic efforts, which include Collegiate Capstone Projects and scholarships and its various multimedia properties.

The Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Hall of Fame™ evaluates and validates professionals submitted for consideration in its three award programs: Bellwether Honorees, Ammer Honorees and Future Famers. The Hall of Fame also offers educational and professional development content via the annual Bellwether Leadership Symposium and its "Leaders & Luminaries" multimedia properties of online and printed content.

The Hall of Fame selects deceased, retired and currently active professionals with a minimum of 25 years of exemplary service and leadership performance in supply chain operations that meet its criteria to be recognized publicly as Bellwether Class Honorees. Future Famers represent supply chain professionals early in their healthcare careers (first 10-12 years) who do not yet qualify for Bellwether consideration but have contributed meaningfully to the profession and industry.

Honorees who receive the "Dean S. Ammer Award for Healthcare Supply Chain Performance Excellence" represent noteworthy executives and professionals in the middle of their careers who, through their innovative leadership and influential project management experience, best exemplify the practice and spirit of healthcare supply chain performance excellence.

To date, the Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Hall of Fame has inducted 148 innovators, leaders and pioneers in healthcare supply chain management in seven distinct categories: Provider-Based Supply Chain Management, Manufacturing, Distribution, Group Purchasing, Consulting Services, Academia and Media. The Hall of Fame also has recognized 45 Future Famers and eight Ammer Honorees.

BLF's philanthropy efforts support capstone educational and developmental projects, grants and scholarships to college-bound high school students who plan to study supply chain curricula, current college students who major in supply chain-related careers and professionals who pursue continuing education through associations and universities.

BLF salutes its six sustaining sponsors at the Founding/Platinum level — GHX, Northwestern Medicine, Owens & Minor, Premier, Vizient and Wingfoot Media — and more than 20 additional sustaining sponsors at the Gold, Silver and Bronze levels. This dedicated group represents manufacturers, distributors, group purchasing organizations (GPOs), integrated delivery networks (IDNs), consulting firms, professional associations and media. BLF also appreciates and thanks its devoted corporate and professional donors for their generosity, participation and partnership.

Launched in late July 2007 by a group of influential veterans in the healthcare supply chain industry, BLF began as an independent 501(c)(6) not-for-profit corporation that upgraded to an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable foundation in January 2021

Follow us on LinkedIn

Or visit Bellwether League Foundation.