Improving Hospital Supply Chains: An Engineering Approach

This book explores supply chain management practices that have been implemented, and have improved supply chains in industries outside of healthcare. The presented supply chain practices have been selected because they have the potential to improve efficiency, reduce costs and improve patient safety within hospitals. Due to the diverse nature of hospitals and a unique product profile, there is no ?one size fits all? supply chain solution that can be implemented. Therefore, product specific characteristics are discussed that can be used by hospitals in order to develop segmentation policies. The culmination of this book is the presentation of a supply chain that will enable the hospital to significantly reduce inventory storage space, on hand inventory value, and time spent by nurses managing inventory. The proposed supply chain model is patient specific and involves the delivery of items from an offsite warehouse directly to the patient?s bedside. Using simulation models, we show that implementation of the proposed supply chain for appropriately segmented products will result in significant supply chain cost savings and boost the revenue.