Requirements planning systems in the health care environment

Abstract

An important problem confronting health care administration is cost containment in hospitals. Much of the current high costs can be traced directly to outdated procedures in materials management leading to waste, excessive inventory and unnecessary obsolescence of expensive short shelf life items. In this paper, we illustrate how a modern requirements planning system for surgical supplies was developed for a private hospital in Houston and used to effectively hold inventory levels to the minimum required to support a detailed schedule of surgical procedures. We also discuss some specific problems involved in the transfer of manufacturing technology to the hospital setting.

Hospital Resource Planning: Concepts, Feasibility, and Framework

“…One of the truly vexing problems in the transfer of manufacturing technology to the health care environment was the lack of a definitive product definition (Roth 1980;Steinberg, Khumawalla, and Scamell 1982). Viewing a DRG as an end-item product with a consumption profile overcomes this formidable obstacle and suggests that hospitals might benefit from materials requirements planning (MRP) or manufacturing resource planning (MRP-II) types of systems.…”

“…The conceptual framework of MRP-II has significant applicability for health care delivery systems" (Rhyne and Jupp 1988, p. 20). Steinberg, Khumawalla, and Scamell ( 1982) have used a microapplication of MRP logic to manage materials in a hospital surgical unit. Showalter ( 1987) proposed using MRP logic for hospitalwide materials management.…”

“…In this section, we describe the major characteristics of hospital resource planning ( HRP). Our schema uses a conceptual architecture similar to the approach originally proposed by Roth ( 1980) for hospital-wide service requirements planning, the MRP application for managing materials requirements in a hospital surgical unit used by Steinberg, Khumawalla, and Scamell ( 1982), and the broad-based MRP approach later suggested by Rhyne and Jupp ( 1988). HRP advances prior research in four important ways: ( 1) consideration of DRGS as products with BOR structures, (2) implementation of hospital-wide (versus unit implementation) planning and control system, and (3) the linkage of details on the various modules and gross-to-net requirements "explosion" logic with treatment staging, and (4) new information systems support for process reengineering redesign in hospitals.…”

“…For example, each of the treatment stages could be further broken down and local MRP-type systems used to provide the gross-to-net requirements. We refer here by way of illustration to planning the operating room materials (Steinberg, Khumawalla, and Scamell 1982). Alternatively, pull-type systems could be set up to control the material and even patient flows through the various resource centers within each of the major treatment stages.…”

Hospital Inventory Management for Emergency Demand

“…Surprisingly, in most previous studies of hospital supply operations, the re s e a rch focus has been on a single level of this multilevel environment, either central s t o re s 2 or point-of-use locations. 3 Several diff e rent methods for managing medical and s u rgical supply inventories are used at the central store s level. Periodic review systems are the most common and are implemented as either a "reorder point-order quantity" system or a "reorder-up-to-point" system. "…”