Supporting the Definition of Strategies for the Configuration of Health Care Supply Chains

A hybrid approach for integrated healthcare cooperative purchasing and supply chain configuration

“…(2) fixed and (3) variable transaction costs; (4) acquisition costs, including GPO margins (or discounts); and (5) inventory carrying costs [52]. In line with what has been observed in practice, we added an acquisition cost scheme considering bundle supplier discounts depending on the aggregate sales of the GPO (or individual hospital) during the planning horizon under consideration.…”

“…Due to the nature of the acquisition and inventory carrying costs considered, our mathematical formulation cannot be based on the structure that is frequently found in the literature (some examples can be found in [54]), that associates the decision variables to the quantities that flow through the network edges. Therefore, as any item flowing through a specific edge can have different costs, depending on its previous path (see a few examples in [52]), our formulation associates the supplied quantities to the network supply paths (several edges) that have been used.…”

“…Due to their features, metaheuristics are well suited to solve complex cross-functional supply chain management problems [59]. Further details about the construction and parameterization of this algorithm are discussed in Rego and Pinho de Sousa [52], but in this paper, for self-containment reasons, we will only present the main characteristics of the adopted approach.…”

“…GPO structure graph for a 5-hospital game (adapted from[51])Module 2 is intended to optimise each potential GPO supply chain, by using a modified version of a model developed in a previous work[52]. This model was inspired by the formulation from Ahuja et al[53] considering a multi-stage, multi-level, multi-product production-distribution system planning problem, based on a graph representation of the problem.…”