Sylvain Landry

The Challenges of Hospital Supply Chain Management, from Central Stores to Nursing Units

The practice of patient care is supported by a range of healthcare supply chain management activities, also referred to by many as healthcare logistics. Improving the efficiency of these activities can provide opportunities for healthcare institutions and health systems to increase the quality of care and reduce costs. Hospitals represent a key link in the supply chain and face their own particular challenges due the complexity of their internal supply chain. The distribution of medical supplies to nursing units represents a vital component of the internal hospital supply chain. Indeed, all doctors, nurses, and clinical support staff deal with and depend on supplies in one way or another and are thus affected by their accessibility and availability on a daily basis. The methods most often used to distribute supplies to nursing units range from requisition-based systems that depend on clinical staff involvement to methods where the hospital’s central stores manage inventory and replenishment. In the latter category, common storage and distribution method options include par level systems and automated cabinets, among others, as well as the two-bin/kanban replenishment method, which has been identified as a best practice. For its part, RFID technology has further enhanced this leading practice and introduced the possibility of proactively managing supplies by triggering replenishment rounds based on a range of user-defined criteria. Beyond its expanded benefits, this innovation opens the door to a large number of research avenues in the areas of capacitated vehicle routing problems, inventory optimization, and simulation.

RFID Adoption in Healthcare and ROI Analysis

RFID is becoming one of the major enabling technologies being considered and adopted into healthcare logistics applications. In this chapter, the authors deliver an overview of the role of RFID in the healthcare industry and introduce some of the basics of sound business case development. To this end, samples of case studies prepared over the past 5 years are presented. In addition, an actual RFID implementation business case and its ROI analysis are included to demonstrate the benefits of the technology in greater detail.

Where to locate medical supplies in nursing units: An exploratory study

ABSTRACT Nursing unit inventory management is often cited as the top irritant that limits nurses’ ability to provide care at bedside. Our research focus is to determine whether the inventory location in the nursing units interferes with the performance of the replenishment system. The literature review suggests that a decentralization of nursing unit storage areas will require additional logistics resources to manage all of these storage points. Our case studies of four Canadian hospitals tend to demonstrate that decentralized locations do not necessarily lead to a decrease in productivity for logistics staff. Furthermore, although our research focuses on the inventory location in nursing units, it is difficult to isolate the impact of this aspect in the context of the entire replenishment system. For example, reorder frequency also has an impact on productivity. Further research could focus on these topics.

La matrice produit-procédé : de l’usine à la chaîne logistique

La matrice produit-procédé, l’un des concepts les plus connus et depuis les trente dernières années l’un des plus commentés dans le domaine de la stratégie d’opération, identifie une zone d’adéquation entre le produit et son procédé en fonction d’un certain nombre de dimensions. Malgré l’émergence des technologies flexibles et du lean production qui, pour certains, ont aboli plusieurs des arbitrages identifiés, l’importance de cette matrice demeure non seulement à l’interne, mais également à l’externe pour encadrer et aligner les choix des acteurs amont et aval d’une chaîne logistique.