Health Care Supply Chain Dynamics: Systems Design of An American Health Care Provider

摘要

Health care organizations supply chains are more problematic to manage compare to its industrial counterparts. Moreover, health care organizations have very little control over the demand of supplies. In this paper we propose an integrated system dynamics framework for analyzing and modeling health care logistics chain. An American health care provider is used as an example to demonstrate the implementation of various stages of our framework. Based on the systems analyses, causal relationships were developed and an EOQ based computer simulation model was built and tested. The analyses of the results revealed that the existing "push" type inventory control policies are not suitable for the type of demand that is usually experienced by the health care systems. The authors further suggest that in the health care sector, inventory management should be based on ranking items in terms of "value" and "criticality" rather "frequency of use" to develop appropriate stocking policy.