AbuKhousa Eman, Al-Jaroodi Jameela, Lazarova-Molnar Sanja, Mohamed Nader
College of Information Technology, UAE University, P.O. Box 15551, Al Ain, UAE.
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
ScientificWorldJournal. 2014 Feb 10;2014:354246. doi: 10.1155/2014/354246. eCollection 2014.
Recently, most healthcare organizations focus their attention on reducing the cost of their supply chain management (SCM) by improving the decision making pertaining processes' efficiencies. The availability of products through healthcare SCM is often a matter of life or death to the patient; therefore, trial and error approaches are not an option in this environment. Simulation and modeling (SM) has been presented as an alternative approach for supply chain managers in healthcare organizations to test solutions and to support decision making processes associated with various SCM problems. This paper presents and analyzes past SM efforts to support decision making in healthcare SCM and identifies the key challenges associated with healthcare SCM modeling. We also present and discuss emerging technologies to meet these challenges.
最近，大多数医疗保健组织都将注意力集中在通过提高相关流程的决策效率来降低其供应链管理（SCM）成本上。通过医疗保健供应链管理实现产品的可得性对患者而言往往生死攸关；因此，在这种环境下，试错法并非可行之选。仿真与建模（SM）已被作为一种替代方法，供医疗保健组织的供应链经理测试解决方案，并支持与各种供应链管理问题相关的决策过程。本文展示并分析了过去为支持医疗保健供应链管理决策所做的仿真与建模工作，并确定了与医疗保健供应链管理建模相关的关键挑战。我们还展示并讨论了应对这些挑战的新兴技术。
