title: Intermittent Demand Forecasting in a Tertiary Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.
abstract: Forecasts of the demand for medical supplies both directly and indirectly affect the operating costs and the quality of the care provided by health care institutions. Specifically, overestimating demand induces an inventory surplus, whereas underestimating demand possibly compromises patient safety. Uncertainty in forecasting the consumption of medical supplies generates intermittent demand events. The intermittent demand patterns for medical supplies are generally classified as lumpy, erratic, smooth, and slow-moving demand. This study was conducted with the purpose of advancing a tertiary pediatric intensive care unit's efforts to achieve a high level of accuracy in its forecasting of the demand for medical supplies. On this point, several demand forecasting methods were compared in terms of the forecast accuracy of each. The results confirm that applying Croston's method combined with a single exponential smoothing method yields the most accurate results for forecasting lumpy, erratic, and slow-moving demand, whereas the Simple Moving Average (SMA) method is the most suitable for forecasting smooth demand. In addition, when the classification of demand consumption patterns were combined with the demand forecasting models, the forecasting errors were minimized, indicating that this classification framework can play a role in improving patient safety and reducing inventory management costs in health care institutions.
authors: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Republic of China. cycheng@ntut.edu.tw.|Program of Health Administration, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China. cycheng@ntut.edu.tw.
authors: Chen-Yang
authors: CY
authors: Cheng
authors: Department of Pediatric Neurology, Kuang-Tien General Hospital, Shatian Road Shalu District, Taichung City, 433, Taiwan, Republic of China.|Program of Health Administration, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China.
authors: Kuo-Liang
authors: KL
authors: Chiang
authors: Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, Republic of China.
authors: Meng-Yin
authors: MY
authors: Chen
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005544:Forecasting; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000639:trends*; D006801:Humans; D015278:Intensive Care Units, Pediatric / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008421:Materials Management, Hospital; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D062606:Tertiary Care Centers / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
keywords: Consumption pattern; Croston’s method; Intermittent demand; Material management