The hospital efficient management: just in time and kanban technique

Nationwide, a fundamental change is taking place in health care. Rapidly increasing health care costs combined with new government policy, have redirected the spotlight of the national attentions to hospitals and other health care providers. To remain viable and competitive in the new cost-conscious environment, hospitals and health-care providers must change the way they have traditionally operated. Costs need to driven down as a managed-care contracts put a cap on revenue opportunities. It will not be business as usual; it will be running an efficient business, and that business is health care. This is the reason in public hospitals the use of the resources is to be optimized by applying economic methodologies developed for private firms. The hospital fulfillment system is very important in the firm balance and for this reason the need of implementing new stock management systems emerged. In this context this paper finds its application: the presented research deals with the design and experimentation of an innovative automatic supply model so as the ward products could be reached by means of a Just In Time system. The first application of the suggested procedure is developed for the City Hospital of Padova (Italy), in particular some representative wards of this hospital were selected for a small scale experimentation: these wards are the most significant of the structure for dimensions, for quantity of managed products and for category. The obtained results are excellent, in fact, with small investments (modular cabinets and “intelligent” trolleys), the quantities and the volumes of the stored products, expired medicines, orders error and unjustified picking operations. Moreover, most of the administrative activities, normally performed by the hospital personnel, are vanished, improving the assistance activities.