Improvement of Medical Consumables Inventory Management by Simulation and Optimization in Hospitals

Abstract

In order to ensure the uninterrupted continuity of their activities, businesses have to keep certain levels of inventory in market conditions that cannot be precisely measured and easily predicted, such as uncertainty in demands and lead times, fluctuations in prices. Inventory for health businesses that produce health service output as a result of business activities; means materials that must be kept for examination, treatment and diagnosis and that directly affect human health. For this reason, the management of medical inventory is very important both for human health and for the financial continuity of hospitals. In this study, which explains the inadequacy of the current medical consumable inventory control method used in the operating room unit of the hospital, which is the subject of the study, by using simulation and optimization techniques, and saving inventory costs by designing alternative inventory control models to the current situation; first of all, the current medical consumable inventory of the operating room were examined by ABC-VED analysis. Then, the new inventory control model, which was created using the (s,S) inventory control policy, in order to be an alternative to the existing inventory control management and current inventory control management of the operating room, was modeled using the stochastic modeling approach in the Arena Simulation package program, using real life data from the hospital. The simulation model is run for both inventory control models and the inventory costs of the materials are calculated for both inventory control models. In the last part of the application, the (s,S) inventory control model, which was designed as an alternative to the current situation, was optimized for the selected materials using the OptQuest optimization tool in the Arena Simulation program. As a result of the optimization, the minimum, maximum and reorder point parameters of the materials used in the study were re-determined to optimize the inventory cost of the materials. By using the optimized inventory parameters (s,S), the inventory control model was run again and the inventory costs of the selected materials were calculated for the third and final time. Finally, the outputs of the three inventory control models were analyzed and it was concluded that the lowest inventory cost value with a confidence level of 95% was achieved by using the optimized (s,S) inventory control model and the current inventory control method of the operating room was insufficient in terms of cost. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.