Abstract
Discrete Event Simulation of Hospital Sterilization Logistics
Highlights
Health care spending has increased dramatically during the last few decades
This paper deals with the optimization of the flow of sterile Reusable Medical Devices (RMD) in a general hospital which takes place between the centralized sterilization department and the operating theatres, clinics, hospital departments or ER
This paper addresses the problem as a logistics optimization problem that has to be solved when redesigning processes to improve material availability and reduce cost
Summary
Health care spending has increased dramatically during the last few decades. Globally, health care spending increased faster than the economic growth. For instance Reymondon and co-authors [5] propose a methodology enabling new grouping choices of RMDs into packages It exploits an innovative sharing strategy, with the final goal to optimize the objective function corresponding to process and storage costs by reducing storage costs. This paper discusses the optimization problems that have to be solved when redesigning processes to improve material availability and reduce cost. Ozturk and co-authors [8] deal with the problem of minimizing the make span of washing operations in hospitals sterilization services. They consider a batchscheduling problem where RMD sets may have different sizes and different release dates for washing. The results and examples in this paper indicate that significant cost reductions are possible when making appropriate use of logistic principles, operations research methods, and IT
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