Towards resource pooling in cooperative health care networks: Case of medical supply centralization

Currently, health care providers are competing in a consumer market under financial pressure and resources shortage. Thus, hospitals begin to form networks and develop more logistic cooperation between them in order to maximize the output/ throughput. In this paper, we study the case of the centralization of medical supplies in a French health care network. We analyze the potential gains of such cooperative scheme through multi criteria optimization approach associated to an integrated inventory- location- allocation problem. A procedure of three steps is suggested to solve the whole problem.