Abstract
Eliminating unnecessary healthcare waste in hospitals and providing better healthcare quality are the core issues of green supply chain management (GSCM). Hence, this study used a hospital’s emergency department crowding (EDC) problem to illustrate how to establish an emergency medicine service (EMS) simulation system to obtain a robust parameters setting for solving hospitals’ EDC and waste problems, thereby increasing healthcare quality. Inappropriate resource allocation results in more serious EDC; more serious EDC results in increasing operating costs. Therefore, in the healthcare system, waste includes inappropriate costs and inappropriate resource allocation. The EMS of a medical center in central Taiwan was the object of the study. In this study, the dynamic Taguchi method was used to set the signal factor, noise factor, and control factors to simulate the EMS system to obtain the optimal parameters setting. The performance was set to Emergency Department Work Index (EDWINC) and system time (waiting time and service time) per patient. The signal factor was set to the number of physicians; the noise factor was set to patient arrival rate; the control factors included persuading Triage 4 and Triage 5 outpatients, checkup process, bed occupation rate in the emergency department (ED), and medical checkup sequence for Triage 4 and Triage 5 patients. This study makes two significant contributions. First, the study introduces the GSCM concept to the healthcare setting to bring green innovation to hospitals. Hospital administrators may hence design better GSCM activities to facilitate healthcare processes to provide better healthcare outcomes. Second, the study applied the dynamic Taguchi method to the EMS and neural network (NN) to construct a computational model revealing the cause (factors) and effect (performances) relationship. In addition, the genetic algorithm (GA), a solution method, was used to obtain the optimal parameters setting of the EDC in Taiwan. Hence, after obtaining the solutions, the unnecessary waste in EDC—inappropriate costs and inappropriate resource allocation—is reduced.
Highlights
In the environmental and public health field, many scholars in recent years have studied green supply chain management (GSCM)
To solve a hospital’s emergency department crowding (EDC) problem, the researchers wonder about the possibility of using the concept of GSCM to set up an emergency medicine service (EMS) system to optimize resource allocation to solve hospitals’ EDC and waste problems
The results showed that based on the performance of EDWINC, the linear ideal function was Y = 1.87 − 0.5M + error, the optimal parameters setting for factors (A, B, C, D) was (Level 1, Level 1, Level 1, Level 1) and the expected result at optimum condition was 11.04 dB
Summary
In the environmental and public health field, many scholars in recent years have studied green supply chain management (GSCM). The healthcare systems’ GSCM can facilitate hospitals’ environmental management practices. Little research has been done on healthcare GSCM. Even after 2016, little research had been undertaken regarding healthcare GSCM. An Iranian pharmaceutical company was the research case Given this dearth of research, there is a great opportunity for future research in healthcare systems’ GSCM [5]. The researchers felt the necessity to use GSCM to eliminate healthcare waste. To solve a hospital’s emergency department crowding (EDC) problem, the researchers wonder about the possibility of using the concept of GSCM to set up an emergency medicine service (EMS) system to optimize resource allocation to solve hospitals’ EDC and waste problems
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