Exploring the future of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry : a supply chain perspective

This thesis uses an innovative approach to explore the much-analyzed U.S. Healthcare system. To be sure, we are fully aware of the challenges involved in making robust system level policy recommendations and how local inefficiencies and hidden uncertainties undermine attempts proposing sweeping changes. Hence, we propose to investigate the Healthcare system using a supply chain perspective, which is inherently cross-functional and typically involves numerous different stakeholders. This holistic view will force us to think beyond artificial functional boundaries that promote local inefficiencies in the Healthcare system. Since the future is increasingly uncertain, we chose to use the scenario planning technique to guide the research process of developing effective system level policies. We will also leverage our insights to recommend new research directions to investigate the redefined system boundaries suggested by our scenarios. Since a Fortune 50 pharmaceutical company was used as a case study, the research focused primarily on a subset of the U.S. Healthcare system namely the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. The research also benefited from a series of workshops with supply chain executives from a variety of industries.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Technology and Policy Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Lagarde, Loïc (Loïc Jean Georges)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Yossi Sheffi and Mahender Singh.

• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40294

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40294