Evaluating Replenishment Systems for Disposable Supplies at the Operating Theater: A Simulation Case Study

Ensuring cost containment while providing high quality patient care is of paramount concern to hospitals. The operating theater in particular is a major cost driver for any hospital, and is among the most critical resources in terms of both capacity and patient care. Effective inventory and distribution systems are a prerequisite for realizing efficiency improvements in the internal operating theater supply chain. In this work, discrete-event simulation is used to model part of the internal distribution process in the operating theater at a Belgian Hospital and to identify improvements by focusing on the replenishment process. A logistics performance measurement framework based on Analytic Network Process (ANP), as a popular Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) technique, is adopted to assess three replenishment scenarios. The best performing scenario is selected using the Internal Logistics Efficiency Performance (ILEP) index as an evaluation basis. This research indicates that industrial engineering techniques, such as simulation and MCDM, which are successfully applied in industrial sectors, can also be adopted to realize efficiency opportunities in healthcare logistics.