Differentiating the hospital supply chain for enhanced performance

This thesis determines how to design the supply chain policies in a hospital for the wide array of products that exist there. This research was done through interviewing staff and analyzing data of two hospitals implementing automated point of use systems. This thesis argues that a hospital needs to implement more than one supply chain policy in order to achieve its objective of maximizing patient care while avoiding prohibitive costs. The research further proposes that a hospital should develop its supply chain for a specific product based on that product's unit cost, demand, variability, physical size, and criticality. The research analyzes demand data from two hospitals and demonstrates that hospital demand can be modeled using a variation of Croston's method for intermittent demand. This fact was used to generate an appropriate s, Q inventory policy that can be adjusted to fit any product and supply chain policy implemented within the hospital. Under simulation, the proposed inventory policy outperformed existing policies by over 50%. This research further argues current aggregate and "one-size-fits-all" strategies are inappropriate in a hospital and discusses the importance for hospitals to add physical size and criticality attributes to their product master files as these will enable further supply chain enhancements.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• DeScioli, Derek T

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan L.S. Byrnes.

• Engineering Systems Division.

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/1721.1/33317

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33317