Healthcare Supply Chain modeling: a conceptual framework

This work describes and illustrates aspects of healthcare operations management and provide advances in theory about patient and materials flow modeling according to System Dynamics paradigm, investigating internal feedback loops and decision-making delays that affect the behavior of the entire system. The conceptual discussion is empirically-derived by the authors and investigates relevant methods and technologies for the design and development of effective and efficient drugs distribution in healthcare supply chains with the help of IT/IS (such as RFID). The study firstly presents an extensive literature review on RFID Technology innovation and diffusion in healthcare representing it as an important tools for decision making. Then it develops a Drugs Administration Process dynamic model and analysis. One aspect addressed is that RFID technology implementation and a right coupling of different IT/IS technologies should be considered in healthcare practices to permit a correct decision making process and decrease drastically adverse drugs events.