Smart Selection of Vendors in Health Services

摘要

Pharmaceutical procurement is a multi-criteria decisionmaking process that deals with optimization of conflicting objectives. This paper presents a multi-criteria decisionmaking system, based on Fuzzy expert system to rank the suppliers. The main objective of carrying out this study was to improve pharmaceutical procurement practices in Ministry of Health (MOH) in Kingdom of Bahrain and to overcome many difficulties in this field. Therefore, the data used to construct the system was gathered using structured questionnaires and administered interviews. The research sample for this study comprised of members from drug committee and from procurement department in MOH. The responses analyzed using descriptive statistics (SPSS). Throughout the data collection procedures, it was conformed to the researcher the current MOH state, pharmaceutical procurement practices, and the set of essential supplier selection criteria used. Data collected was fed to the constructed fuzzy expert system in MATLAB programming environment. Based on the results, supplier with the total highest score becomes the most suitable alternative. Numbers of recommendations offered to MOH, aiming to improve the procurement practices and trying to include modern business practices using IT and modern technological tools in healthcare procurement practices.