2 research outputs found
Facilitating PatientāCentric 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 patientsā demographic and hospitalization information can be integrated to support the patientācentric 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 patientsā information contributes to not only better logistics management and cost containment, but also to securing the medical require-ments of individual patients. In patientācentric 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 inpatientsā total medical requirement at the beginning of the hospitalization and rectify the patientsā 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 inpatientās gender, age, diagnosis, and their preliminary expected days in the hospital. The allocated inventory is updated after the early treatment by rectifying the inpa-tientās 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 patientārelated information with the conventional FM processes and demonstrates the potential improvement in patientsā satisfaction with better hospital logistics and pharmaceutical services