Importance of Supply Chain Management in Healthcare of Third World Countries

Abstract

Healthcare Supply Chain Logistics is series of processes, workforce involved across different teams and movement of medicines, surgical equipment, and other products as needed by healthcare professionals to do their job. The aim of Supply Chain in Healthcare is to find the vulnerabilities among departments and propose measures to reduce them. It aims to identify weak areas to achieve targeted health outcome and increases investments in global health. The advantages of efficient Supply Chain in Healthcare is improved processes, efficient utilization of resources, satisfied employees, effective treatment and happy Patients. The significance of the research paper is to analyze possible loopholes in the healthcare and recommended controls which can be applied practically so as to bring improvement in the healthcare. In Hospitals Integrated Supply Chain should be implemented to meet the objectives. The Supply Chain ensures proper linkage of hospitals department, operations, revenue cycle. The Supply Chain can be visualized as a back end program running which is necessary to integrate all the different processes together. The supply chain implemented ensures availability of medicine/product at right time, minimizing inventory wastage, maximizing patient care, coordination in all departments minimizing human error/medication errors. This can be accomplished by using possible measures i.e. integrating subsystems [10], streamlining workflow and use of RFID technologies, standard product code, Global Identification number(GIN).