Analysis of the supply chain management in a Portuguese public hospital: a case study

A situação atual das unidades de saúde é caracterizada pelo custo crescente da prestação dos cuidados, pelo consequente agravamento da situação financeira e pelos processos complicados e morosos. Aliados à procura crescente, podem tornar-se fatores que tornam a resposta do serviço deficiente. Devido a esta situação, uma gestão mais eficiente e eficaz da logística e da cadeia de abastecimento é reconhecida transversalmente como uma das principais áreas de melhoria. A fim de dar a conhecer quais as áreas a melhorar, vários objetivos foram contemplados neste trabalho, como a análise dos métodos e critérios de seleção de medicamentos em farmácias hospitalares, a definição de obstáculos à gestão racional de stocks e a análise de dados históricos para previsão da procura futura num hospital público português. O estudo revelou que alguns dos 1.346 produtos presentes no ERP da farmácia não têm dados históricos suficientes para criar uma previsão precisa. Neste contexto, e considerando um nível de serviço de 99%, 41% dos produtos têm stock superior ao que deveria ser o stock máximo, cerca de € 147.908,87 de imobilizado e 11% dos produtos estavam, à data, em risco de esgotar stock. A evolução dos sistemas de informação nos Hospitais deve garantir a sustentabilidade tecnológica da transformação digital, o alinhamento com as medidas de racionalização das TIC, a melhoria do serviço ao cliente e a melhoria da qualidade da informação disponibilizada ao utilizador. Por outro lado, considerando o atual evento de pandemia, foi analisado o seu impacto na cadeia de abastecimento hospitalar. A mudança de comportamento dos pacientes hospitalizados levou a duas quebras nítidas em dois indicadores relevantes, o número de consultas hospitalares e os gastos com medicamentos. Estes indicadores mostram que existe menos procura de serviços hospitalares regulares programados, com menos 1,9M de consultas realizadas nos Hospitais Públicos portugueses. No que concerne o consumo de medicamentos a nível nacional, previu-se um custo adicional de 103M € até ao final do ano, mais elevado do que nos anos anteriores.The current situation of healthcare units is characterized by the increasing cost of providing the respective care, the consequent deterioration of the financial situation and the complicated and time-consuming processes. Allied to the growing demand, they could become factors that make the service demand deficient. Due to this situation, more efficient and effective logistics and supply chain management is transversally recognized as one of the main areas for improvement. In order to provide insight on which areas to improve, several objectives where looked after in this work, as the analysis of the methods and criteria for the selection of medicines in hospital pharmacies, the definition of obstacles to the rational management of stocks and analysis of historical data to forecast future demand of a Portuguese public hospital. The study revealed that some of the 1346 products present on the pharmacy’s ERP do not have sufficient historical data to create an accurate forecast. With this context, and considering a service level of 99%, 41% of products have a stock higher than what should be the maximum stock, approximately € 147.908,87 of fixed assets and 11% of the products were, at the time, at risk of going out of stock. The importance of the evolution of core information system of Hospitals was at stake, ensuring the technological sustainability of the ongoing digital transformation, alignment with ICT rationalization measures, improvement of customer service and improvement of the quality of information available to the user. On a side note, considering the current event of pandemics, it was analyzed its impact on hospital supply chain. The change in the behavior of hospital patients led to two clear breaks in two relevant indicators, the number of hospital visits and spending on medication. These indicators show that there is less demand for scheduled hospital services, 1,9M less consultations carried out in Portuguese Public Hospitals. In these times, the capacity for hospital care and intensive care is exceeded, creating a significant challenge. In Portugal, as the impact of the pandemic on medication consumption nationwide, it was predicted an additional cost of € 103M by the end of the year, higher than in previous years

Feasibility of Electronic Health Information and Surveillance System (eHISS) for disease symptom monitoring: A case of rural Ghana.

The current surge of mobile phone use in many African countries creates the opportunity to provide caregivers with limited access to the health care system with vital health recommendations. At the same time such communication system can be utilised to collect tempero-spatial data on disease symptoms

The Anatomy of Medication Errors

Medication errors constitute a category of errors that occur more frequently in healthcare units. They refer to every preventable event that may cause or lead to the inappropriate use of medicines or patient injury, during the therapeutic process. This type of events may be associated with professional practices, healthcare products, procedures, and systems including prescription, communication through instructions, drug labeling, packaging and nomenclature, reformulation, dissolution, distribution, administration, education, monitoring, and use. Classification and evaluation of medication errors according to their importance may constitute an important factor for process improvement in order to render the administration of medicines as safe as possible. The main categories of causes that lead to medication errors are those associated with the healthcare provider system, the healthcare professional, the pharmacy, and the scientific competence of the personnel. Technology has grown to be a constituent part of medicine these days. The appropriate technology is able to assist in increased efficiency, enhanced quality, and lessened costs. A few advantages that technology can supply are categorized as follows: the assisting of communication between clinicians; enhancing medication safety; decreasing potential medical errors and adverse events; rising access to medical information and encouraging patient-centered healthcare. The aim of this chapter is to provide a compendious literature review regarding the definition, the classification, the causes, and the main strategies for preventing medication errors

Abstract book: poster week 10/18

Poster Week 10/18. ESTeSC-Coimbra Health School. November 19th-23th, 2018.info:eu-repo/semantics/draf

Medthings AS – a break-through innovation with the handling of medication

Master’s in Applied and Commercial Biotechnology. Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Applied Ecology, Agriculture Sciences and Biotechnology.Patients depend on medicines to maintain health, prevent illness, manage chronic ailments and treat/improve disease conditions. However, there are growing reports indicating the misuse of medicines (not taken on time, skipped dosage, irregular or improper dosage) causing a great deal of challenge to the health sector. The major challenge lies with the elderly people (above 75 years) who often tends to forget their medications or are not adhered to it. At present, changing demography with a high number of elderly people and providing them quality health services is the biggest challenge. People aged 80 years or over use an average of 5.8 prescription drugs per person. The global spending on medicine reached 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars in 2018 and is set to exceed 1.5 trillion dollars by 2023, while the global automatic pill dispenser machine market accounted for 1,755 million dollars in 2016 and is estimated to reach 3,023 million dollars by 2023. Studies suggests that 25% of the emergency rooms are alone filled with patients taking wrong medications making it the cause of majority of the deaths and involving an expenditure of $10.30 billion annually. Several losses of life can be avoided if intake of medicine can be controlled. In addition, there is a huge medicine wastage due to unused/expired or skipped dosage. In 2019, Swedish pharmacies collected over 1,300 tonnes of medicinal residues (Wallêr, 2019), affecting the economy and well and the nature. Medicine management plays a very vital role in order to ensure the correct intake of medicine. Several approaches, from nurses to automated robots have been sought to ensure the correct use of medicines but none of them have been able to turn out completely effective. The variety of automated pill dispensers in the market with multiple functionality and features lack one thing or the other. Although every dispenser is produced with the aim of dispensing the correct medicine at the correct time with accurate dose, it fails to ensure whether the medicine is actually taken or just thrown away. This thesis was written with a purpose to investigate the specific needs for medicine management using Mobili 1) and to suggest a market entry strategy for it in the Swedish market. Several articles and literature reviews were considered to gather background knowledge on this issue and some primary data were collected through personal communications with 10 concerned persons. Furthermore, business analysis tools were also used to study the market and the target customers and to know about the competitors. Overall, an image that despite a hefty number of pill dispensers in the market, the exact number of them used at present and their comparison based on the price was not clear. An important finding was that although not quite great, but still there is possibility of entrance and success for Mobili with the target group of people above 75 years with chronic ailment and multi drugs prescriptions, or young age group with daily supplement intake having a busy schedule requiring reminder. Although there was a conflict of thoughts on the benefits and trustworthiness of the pill dispensers, yet the literature suggested that the elderlies are quite familiar with the technology and the health professionals also praise such automated pill dispensers. 1) An innovative and modern pill dispenser system produced by Medthings AS, Norwa

Facilitating Patient‐Centric Thinking in Hospital Facility Management: A Case of Pharmaceutical Inventory

Conventional hospital facility management (FM) focuses on reasonably allocating various resources to support core healthcare services from the perspectives of the FM department and hos-pital. However, since patients are the main service targets of hospitals, the patients’ demographic and hospitalization information can be integrated to support the patient‐centric facility manage-ment, aiming at a higher level of patient satisfaction with respect to the hospital environment and services. Taking the pharmaceutical services in hospital inpatient departments as the case, forecasting the pharmaceutical demands based on the admitted patients’ information contributes to not only better logistics management and cost containment, but also to securing the medical require-ments of individual patients. In patient‐centric facility management, the pharmacy inventory is re-garded as the combination of medical resources that are reserved and allocated to each admitted patient. Two forecasting models are trained to predict the inpatients’ total medical requirement at the beginning of the hospitalization and rectify the patients’ length of stay after early treatment. Specifically, once a patient is admitted to the hospital, certain amounts of medical resources are reserved, according to the inpatient’s gender, age, diagnosis, and their preliminary expected days in the hospital. The allocated inventory is updated after the early treatment by rectifying the inpa-tient’s estimated length of stay. The proposed procedure is validated using medical data from eight-een hospitals in a Chinese city. This study facilitates the integration of patient‐related information with the conventional FM processes and demonstrates the potential improvement in patients’ satisfaction with better hospital logistics and pharmaceutical services