Hospital material management in Taiwan: a survey.

The new insurance policy that began in 1995 for all people in Taiwan and severe competition within the health care industry are some of the pressing issues forcing hospitals to improve their operational efficiency. A primary productivity improvement for hospitals is the reduction of the cost of material management because the materiel function on average controls 30-40 percent of the operating dollars in a Taiwan hospital. In this article, a fuzzy clustering method is used to classify the different types of materiel management systems within Taiwan hospitals. Inventory turnover rates and fill rates are compared among those different types of systems by using multivariate analysis of variance. The results show that the differences in both inventory turnover rates and fill rates are statistically significant among different material management systems.