Banner Health is one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the country, with roughly 30 hospitals and hundreds of care sites concentrated in Arizona and spread across Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming, and other Western states. A system that size buys constantly: medical and surgical supplies, pharmaceuticals, facilities and construction, IT, professional services, food, and the long tail of operational goods that keep hospitals running. If you sell anything a health system uses, Banner is a buyer worth pursuing.
The catch is that hospital procurement does not work like selling to a small business. You do not email a manager and send an invoice. You register in a supplier portal, you wait to be matched against a need, and you compete in a structured sourcing process. Here is how that works at Banner, and how diverse-business certification changes your odds.
Start in the SupplierGateway portalBanner Health runs vendor registration through a supplier portal powered by SupplierGateway, reachable at bannerhealth.suppliergateway.com. This is the front door. Both prospective vendors and existing business partners are asked to register a profile that describes the organization and the products or services it offers.
Registration is not the same as winning a contract. Banner's supply chain team reviews vendor profiles to identify potential suppliers for future Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and other procurement opportunities. Think of the portal as a database the buyers search when a need comes up. Your job at this stage is to be findable and to be specific.
That means filling out the profile completely. Map your offering to the categories Banner actually buys, list the right product or service codes, note your geographic coverage across the Banner footprint, and load any documentation that proves you can serve a healthcare client (insurance, certifications, references). A thin profile gets skipped. A precise one gets shortlisted.
What Banner buys, and how to positionBanner's spend spans the usual hospital categories. Clinical: medical-surgical products, devices, pharmaceuticals, lab. Non-clinical: facilities maintenance, construction and capital projects, environmental services, food and nutrition, IT hardware and software, and professional and consulting services.
Be honest about where you fit. A regional janitorial, landscaping, staffing, or printing company has a more realistic near-term path than a first-time medical-device vendor, because clinical products carry heavy compliance and group-purchasing-organization (GPO) dynamics. If you are a services or facilities supplier, lead with reliability, local presence, and the ability to scale across multiple sites. That is what a multi-state system needs.
Banner's supplier diversity programBanner Health formally launched its Supplier Diversity Program on October 5, 2023, and hired a dedicated Supplier Diversity Program Manager to run it. The stated purpose is to make sure all suppliers, including minority- and women-owned enterprises, have equal access to procurement and contracting opportunities, and to connect qualified diverse suppliers to RFPs, contractor engagements, and other openings.
Banner defines a diverse supplier as a business that is at least 51 percent owned and controlled by minorities, women, disadvantaged or disabled individuals, veterans, and/or LGBTQ individuals. That definition maps directly to the major third-party certifications:
- Minority-owned (MBE): NMSDC affiliate certification. See our NMSDC certification guide for how that process works.
- Women-owned (WBE/WOSB): WBENC, or the federal WOSB program through the SBA.
- Veteran-owned (VBE/SDVOSB): NaVOBA or the federal VetCert/SDVOSB program.
- LGBTQ-owned (LGBTBE): NGLCC.
- Disability-owned (DOBE): Disability:IN.
Banner has not published a single closed list of which certifying bodies it will and will not accept, so the safe move is to hold a recognized third-party certification that matches your ownership. These are the same certifications corporate and hospital buyers rely on to count diverse spend, and they remove any question about whether your status is real. Banner's diverse procurement opportunities exceeded $15 million in 2022, before the formal program even launched, and the system has since been recognized nationally for advancing supply chain diversity. The program is real and growing, not a checkbox.
Certification does not get you a contract. It gets you into the diverse-supplier pool the program actively works to connect with buyers, and it lets Banner count your contract toward its diversity goals. For a system trying to grow that number, your certified status is a reason to pick you over an equivalent competitor.
Get your certification and profile in order firstThe sequence matters. Before you spend time perfecting a SupplierGateway profile, get the credential that makes the profile worth more.
If you qualify as minority-, women-, veteran-, LGBTQ-, or disability-owned and you are not yet certified, that is the highest-leverage step. Certification is what unlocks the diversity side of Banner's program and the same status opens doors at thousands of other corporate and hospital buyers. The applications are detailed and document-heavy, and each certifying body wants slightly different proof of ownership and control.
If you want to see which certifications you actually qualify for and have the paperwork handled in one pass instead of filing five separate applications, that is what CertifyAll does. You answer questions once, and it figures out the certifications you're eligible for and prepares the filings.
While that runs, do your homework on the buyer side. Browse the corporate program directory to see how other large buyers structure diverse-supplier programs, and consider listing your business in our supplier directory so procurement teams looking for diverse vendors can find you outside any single portal.
A realistic next stepSelling to Banner Health is a medium-term play, not a quick win. The portal review cycle, RFP timing, and healthcare compliance all take patience. The work you can do today is the work that pays off across every buyer at once: get certified, build a precise profile, and be in the pool when a need surfaces.
If you think you qualify as a diverse business, start by confirming it. Check which certifications you qualify for, get the paperwork moving, and you'll have a stronger Banner Health profile and a credential that travels everywhere else you want to sell.
