Evaluating Segmented Healthcare Supply Chain Strategies

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2013

Authors

Nazaré Rego (Author) FEUP; João Claro (Author) FEUP; Jorge Pinho de Sousa (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: ORAHS 2013

Pages: 128-131

Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS) 2013 Conference

Istanbul, Turkey, 7-12 July 2013

Scientific classification

FOS: Engineering and technology

CORDIS: Social sciences > Political sciences > Public policy > Technology policy ; Social sciences > Economics > Management studies > Technology management

Other information

Abstract (EN): In the last decades, academics and managers have presented arguments and examples to support the idea that companies should not apply a "one-size-fits-all" strategy to manage multi-product supply chains. However, it may be challenging to link the desired supply chain capabilities – e.g., low cost, speed, high quality and/or flexibility, safety – to the actual operational processes and resources that are in the sphere of decision makers. A hospital supply system provides a great variety of services and products through a network of diverse and relatively autonomous point of care units (wards), and must assure a high service level, as the occurrence of stock-outs can, in extreme situations, threaten the patients’ life. Additionally, the various stakeholders involved in the decision process often have different perspectives of what "good" system performance is, and individuals' reactions to the system state (namely, to the information they obtain about that state) highly influence subsequent system performance. In this work, we partition the myriad of pharmaceutical and medical items that flow through the supply chain of a hospital system composed by three neighbour hospitals into a practicable number of homogeneous groups (clusters/segments), in terms of the capabilities they need/require from the hospital system supply chain. Afterwards, we suggest different supply chain operations strategies in order to fit the requirements of the specific supply chain segments identified, and evaluate these strategies using simulation models that take into account the influence of individuals' behaviour/decisions on the outcome of the different strategies.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific