Supplier Selection in the Healthcare Sector

Abstract

Supplier selection is a common practice in industrial sector and is usually conducted by engineers and administrators. However, in the healthcare sector, supplier selection is less commonly studied. This chapter proposes a methodology that simplifies the selection of suppliers in hospitals. As case study, the authors propose an example in which they evaluate six potential suppliers as alternatives with five attributes. The proposed methodology integrates the nominal group technique (NGT) to weight the attributes and dimensional analysis to estimate an index of similarity to an ideal supplier. This index of similarity is obtained from the best nominal values of the attributes. This methodology can be easily applied; it is intuitive and friendly to inexpert users, since the evaluation can be performed using a traditional spreadsheet. Also, the proposal allows for the simultaneous evaluation of multiple attributes and can be used by hospital administrators themselves, which prevents hospitals from hiring external services.