A Decision Support System for Drug Inventory Management within an Emergency Department: A Case Study

The healthcare sector aims providing patients with the best quality of care. However, healthcare supply chain management is costly. In this paper, we focus on inventory drugs management. The main major problems regarding inventory management practice in healthcare system are: drugs shortage, overstock, unfunded forecasting technique due to the lack of drugs consumption information and absence of IT support as Decision Support System. In order to address this concern, this paper presents a real case study of a drug inventory management problem within the emergency service of a Tunisian Hospital: Charles Nicolle Teaching Hospital. The indicated service aims to optimize the drug stock management and procurement while reducing drug shortage and stock management costs. Precisely, we have investigated a set of the real hospital dataset and, in particular, the emergency service's pharmacy. This analysis phase has yield to develop a drugs classification and to establish adequate inventory policy for each drug family. The implementation of the developed policies reduces significantly the stock management costs. Then, a Decision Support System (DSS) was implemented to assists users to improve the drugs inventory management as well as to make reliable decisions by taking the adequate action at the right moment.