title: The performance of material management in health care organizations.
abstract: This paper studies the hospital supply chain. The analysis of the operational and financial data of hospital administrative structures has permitted the discovery of the characteristics of work carried out by the employees and the different strategies used by the managers. Firstly, hospital supply chains must be classified into two groups influenced by medical factors (short-term and long-term hospitals). Secondly, two different management approaches can be observed when the supply chain operations are analysed. The first approach assigns a larger budget priority to inventory control, packages reception and internal distribution. Thus, the purchasing services have relatively fewer resources. In the second approach, contract negotiation and product ordering processes are enforced by the deployment of, relatively, more personnel. In both cases, the central store service performs merchandise reception and distribution according to the strategies determined by the purchasing service.
authors.affiliation: Département de Mathématique et Génie Industriel, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche en Analyse des Organisations (CIRANO), Canada. dacostai@cirano.umontreal.ca
authors.forename: Ivan
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Dacosta-Claro
mesh_terms: D002017:Budgets; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D004865:Equipment and Supplies, Hospital / Q000600:supply & distribution*; D006302:Health Services Research; D006750:Hospital Distribution Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*; D008330:Management Audit; D008421:Materials Management, Hospital / Q000191:economics / Q000458:organization & administration*; D009313:National Health Programs; D011792:Quebec; D013597:Systems Analysis