Enhancing healthcare supply chain resilience: decision-making in a fuzzy environment

Management of drug supply chain information based on "artificial intelligence + vendor managed inventory" in China: perspective based on a case study

Objectives

To employ a drug supply chain information system to optimize drug management practices, reducing costs and improving efficiency in financial and asset management.

Methods

A digital artificial intelligence + vendor managed inventory (AI+VMI)-based system for drug supply chain information management in hospitals has been established. The system enables digitalization and intelligentization of purchasing plans, reconciliations, and consumption settlements while generating purchase, sales, inventory reports as well as various query reports. The indicators for evaluating the effectiveness before and after project implementation encompass drug loss reporting, inventory discrepancies, inter-hospital medication retrieval frequency, drug expenditure, and cloud pharmacy service utilization.

Results

The successful implementation of this system has reduced the hospital inventory rate to approximately 20% and decreased the average annual inventory error rate from 0.425‰ to 0.025‰, significantly boosting drug supply chain efficiency by 42.4%. It has also minimized errors in drug application, allocation, and distribution while increasing adverse reaction reports. Drug management across multiple hospital districts has been standardized, leading to improved access to medicines and enhanced patient satisfaction.

Conclusion

The AI+VMI system improves drug supply chain management by ensuring security, reducing costs, enhancing efficiency and safety of drug management, and elevating the professional competence and service level of pharmaceutical personnel.

Resilience of hospitals in an age of disruptions: a systematic literature review on resources and capabilities

Hospitals play a critical role in ensuring continuous and effective healthcare delivery, especially during crises. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in hospital systems, prompting a need to enhance resilience-the ability to withstand, absorb, respond to, recover from, and learn from disasters. A systematic literature review, grounded in the resource-based view, identified organizational characteristics, in terms of resources and capabilities, and their synergistic effects that bolster hospital resilience. The results demonstrate that digital technologies impact on anticipation and adaptation abilities, organizational capabilities to reorganize roles, tasks, and spaces enhance adaptability, and Inter-organizational collaborations increase the responsiveness of the hospitals. The study provides substantial theoretical and practical contributions. It expands knowledge of hospital resilience in light of recent disruptive events and promotes integration capabilities as determinants for the majority of resilience dimensions. All organisational and inter-organisational collaboration, cooperation, and coordination are deemed crucial for hospital resilience.

Confirmation of a measurement model for hospital supply chain resilience

Background

The hospital supply chain has revealed increasing vulnerabilities and disruptions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, threatening the healthcare services and patient safety. The resilience of hospital supply chains has emerged as a paramount concern within the healthcare system. However, there is a lack of systematic research to develop an instrument tailored to the healthcare industry that is both valid and reliable for measuring hospital supply chain resilience. Therefore, this study aims to construct and validate a comprehensive scale for assessing hospital supply chain resilience, based on dynamic capability theory.

Methods

This study followed rigorous scale development steps, starting with a literature review and 15 semi-structured interviews to generate initial items. These items were then refined through expert panel feedback and three rounds of Delphi studies. Using data from 387 hospitals in Province S, mainland China, the scale underwent rigorous testing and validation using structural equation modeling. To ensure the most effective model, five alternative models were examined to determine the most suitable parsimonious model.

Results

The study produced a 26-item scale that captures five dimensions of resilience in line with dynamic capability theory: anticipation, adaptation, response, recovery, and learning, all showing satisfactory consistency, reliability and validity.

Conclusion

The multi-dimensional scale offers hospital managers a valuable tool to identify areas needing attention and improvement, benchmark resilience against their counterparts, and ultimately strengthen their supply chains against unexpected risks.

Sustainability metrics of environmental sustainability in Iranian manufacturing sector: achieving through human resources

The paper investigates the impact of green human resource management (GHRM) on operatives' green actions in Iranian businesses. GHRM is a human resource management approach that prioritizes environmental and social responsibility. The study uses a random sample of 385 managers and employees from Iran's industrialized businesses in all regions. The research uses partial least square structure equations modeling to evaluate the suggested framework. The results show that GHRM practices affect corporate social responsibility, green attitudes inside the workplace, and green activities taken by workers. In addition, a green mentality and a commitment to corporate social responsibility encourage environmental activities in the workplace. The green psychosocial environment and corporate social responsibilities are intermediaries between green human resources development and individual green behaviour in Iranian businesses. The study suggests that incorporating sustainability metrics into the human resource management system is vital for achieving a sustainable future in industrial development. The research has important implications for businesses around the world, particularly those in the manufacturing sector, by encouraging them to adopt more environmentally responsive methods, including reducing resource usage.

Managing healthcare supply chain through artificial intelligence (AI): A study of critical success factors

Healthcare is one of the most critical sectors due to its importance in handling public health. With the outbreak of various diseases, more recently during Covid-19, this sector has gained further attention. The pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities in the healthcare supply chain (HSC). Recent advancements like the adoption of various advanced technologies viz. AI and Industry 4.0 in the healthcare supply chain are turning out to be game-changers. This study focuses on identifying critical success factors (CSFs) for AI adoption in HSC in the emerging economy context. Rough SWARA is used for ranking CSFs of AI adoption in HSC. Results indicate that technological (TEC) factors are the most influential factor that impacts the adoption of AI in HSC in the context of emerging economies, followed by institutional or environmental (INT), human (HUM), and organizational (ORG) dimensions.

A hybrid framework to model resilience in the generic medicine supply chain of MSMEs

Purpose

One of the most important components of healthcare is the timely delivery of pharmaceutical products, such as life-saving medicines. However, disruptions like COVID-19 bring new challenges and risks to the pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) and healthcare organizations that impact their operational performance. This study focuses on mitigating risks in India's generic medicine supply chain (GMSC) as a result of various disruptions, which can assist policymakers develop appropriate plans and strategies to build resilience in the Jan Aushadhi Scheme (JAS) of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in order to improve their overall performance.

Design/methodology/approach

Risk-causing vulnerabilities and resilience capabilities are identified from the literature review and expert's opinions. Following that, the vulnerabilities are classified into cause-and-effect vulnerabilities, and supply chain resilient capabilities (SCRCs) are measured using a hybrid fuzzy DEMATEL and best worst method (FDEMATEL-BMW) framework.

Findings

The outcome of the study reveals that transportation breakdown, loss of human resources and loss of suppliers are the potential risk-causing vulnerabilities that lead to vulnerabilities like shortages of medicines, loss of in-hand stock qualities and loss of sales/revenue. In addition, the analysis suggests that the sustainability of an organization with maximum weightage is the critical factor for building resilience in GMSC followed by flexibility, agility and visibility.

Practical implications

The integration of resilience into Jan Aushadhi GMSC can help in managing disruptions efficiently and effectively to mitigate risk and optimize MSMEs overall performance.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work will be the first of its kind to model resilience in GMSC of MSMEs using a hybrid framework.

Analyzing the key performance indicators of circular supply chains by hybrid fuzzy cognitive mapping and Fuzzy DEMATEL: evidence from healthcare sector

This study presents a multi-layer fuzzy-based decision-making approach to enhance the hospital Circular Supply Chain (CSC) performance by focusing on intensive care units (ICU) via key performance indicators analysis. In this regard, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and Institution Fuzzy Delphi (IFD) are employed to extract the relevant and prominent KPIs. After, a hybrid Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) and Fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (FDEMATEL) have been applied to illustrate a conceptual framework for the CSC performance management of the healthcare sector in the emerging economy of Iran. As a result, eight critical indicators emanated from the SLR-IFD approach. Furthermore, sixteen relationships amongst the performance indicators were identified via hybrid FCM-FDEMATEL. Inventory availability, information availability, innovation, and technology were selected as the most influential indicators. Besides, changing the information technology category, including information availability and Innovation and technology, had the most impact on the performance of the entire CSC. This study attempts to evaluate hospitals' circular supply chain performance, by designing the circular evaluation framework. Hospital managers can use the results of this research to improve their internal circular supply chain performances in the intensive care units by understanding the different scenarios.

Supply chain sustainability risk decision support model using integrated Preference Selection Index (PSI) method and prospect theory

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the integrated model of the Preference Selection Index (PSI) and the prospect theory as new means to appraise the impact of supply chain sustainability risks based on five pillars of sustainability. Research has shown that sustainability risk assessment has a strong positive impact on improving the performance of enterprises.

Design/methodology/approach

This study adopts a new decision support model for assessing supply chain sustainability risk based on additional failure mode and effect analysis parameters and its integration with PSI methodology and prospect theory. A case example of the supply chain small and medium enterprise (SME) producing fashion have been used in this study.

Findings

The result of this study reveals some critical supply chain sustainability risks affecting the sustainability of enterprises under study.

Research limitations/implications

The use of a limited sample is often associated as a limitation in the research studies and this study is based on findings from SMEs in the fashion retail supply chain. This preliminary study provides academics and practitioners an exemplar of supply chain sustainability risk assessment using integration of the PSI method and prospect theory.

Practical implications

The result of this study is beneficial for practitioners, particularly owner–managers of SMEs who can use this study as guidance on how to consider risk behavior to identify and select the critical sustainability risks and plan mitigating strategies accordingly.

Originality/value

Scientific studies on using the PSI and its integration with prospect theory as means to assess the criticality of supply chain sustainability risks is very rare. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that presents the integrated model of the PSI and prospect theory to rank supply chain sustainability risks based on five pillars of sustainability.