Abstract
In recent years, the health sector has faced increasingly important challenges. Due to the economic crisis and competitions, hospitals are facing many issues affecting the supply chain, such as budget cuts or lack thereof as well as insufficient human resources. Although essential for an excellent service, logistics take up a considerable part of the budget as challenges need to be addressed such as delays in drugs delivery, transportation and storage conditions, routing and scheduling. As to governance, each hospital is assigned to a specific region, which cannot be defined due to political, demographic, or geographic issues. This paper focuses on multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP) in healthcare logistics to feed the hospital pharmacies. The idea is to apply MDVRP's approach to the health sector, specifically hospital pharmacies. In this projection, hospitals are considered to present clients, and central pharmacies present deposits. This problem (the MDVRP) is known by this nature NP-hard. For that, the heuristic method was used as genetic algorithm to solve the problem. The paper is organized as follows, the first section discusses, compares, and proposes clustering methods for healthcare facilities with applying them on Moroccan hospitals case; the second section proposes a genetic algorithm to resolve the MDVRP with a simulation.
Highlights
Availability of medicines in hospital pharmacy is important as far as providing a good quality of service which led to the reduction of mortality and patient’s satisfaction
The second section, project the multi-depot vehicle routing problem (MDVRP) to healthcare logistics making the hospitals as customers and centralized pharmacies as a depot, with an implementation of GA to resolve the NP-Hard nature of the problem
In our work we propose a solution to improve the creation of new centralized pharmacies (CS) and determine the methodology of the delivery of drugs to hospitals, by clustering regions who will be served by a regional pharmacies as a first step, based on Performance indicators shared by the same ministry (Sante en Chiffres, 2015). the second step is to project the MDVRP problem to a logistic chain of healthcare by making the hospital as a customer and CS as a depot
Summary
Availability of medicines in hospital pharmacy is important as far as providing a good quality of service which led to the reduction of mortality and patient’s satisfaction. To solve the problems of late delivery and to ensure quality transport, hospital pharmacies are supplied by central or provincial pharmacies that must deliver drugs and equipments by vehicles. The second section, project the MDVRP to healthcare logistics making the hospitals as customers and centralized pharmacies as a depot, with an implementation of GA to resolve the NP-Hard nature of the problem. In our work we propose a solution to improve the creation of new centralized pharmacies (CS) and determine the methodology of the delivery of drugs to hospitals, by clustering regions who will be served by a regional pharmacies as a first step, based on Performance indicators shared by the same ministry (Sante en Chiffres, 2015). The second step is to project the MDVRP problem to a logistic chain of healthcare by making the hospital as a customer and CS as a depot In our work we propose a solution to improve the creation of new centralized pharmacies (CS) and determine the methodology of the delivery of drugs to hospitals, by clustering regions who will be served by a regional pharmacies as a first step, based on Performance indicators shared by the same ministry (Sante en Chiffres, 2015). the second step is to project the MDVRP problem to a logistic chain of healthcare by making the hospital as a customer and CS as a depot
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