Integrated emergency medical supply planning considering multiple supply channels in healthcare coalitions

Abstract

Emergency medical supplies are crucial for the successful disaster response of healthcare coalitions. In practice, a healthcare coalition can obtain emergency medical supplies from three channels, i.e., supply pre-positioning, contracted reserve and emergency procurement, which, however, are not planned integrally in the literature. To fill the research gap, this study proposes a two-stage stochastic programming model for integrated emergency medical supply planning considering multiple supply channels in healthcare coalitions. In the first stage before disasters, decisions on emergency medical supply pre-positioning and signing of two types of medical supply procurement contracts are determined. In the second stage after disasters, decisions of emergency supply procurement, contract implementation, and supply transshipment are optimized based on the first-stage decisions and the realized uncertain disaster impacts. To show the effectiveness of our model and obtain managerial insight, we develop four comparison models and conduct a case study on the healthcare coalition of West China Hospital in China. This study highlights the great benefits of supplementing the pre-positioning of emergency medical supplies with multi-type contracted reserve in healthcare coalitions and emphasizes the importance of strengthening cooperation with suppliers and encouraging all member hospitals to implement the contracted reserve.