PROPOSAL OF A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK TO OPTIMISE DRUG MANAGEMENT IN HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS

Department of Industrial Engineering – University of Salerno - Via Ponte don Melillo, 84084 Fisciano (SA) – Italy ABSTRACT Drug expenditure is a relevant factor in profit and loss account of healthcare systems. Hospital management is in charge of optimising drug management in order to reduce inventory costs and maximise the cost-effective use of personnel and resources. This paper presents a conceptual framework to tackle this problem, embodying the starting point for future researches. To this purpose, it describes a representation of physical and information flows related to drugs in a hospital , the variables related to the hospital environment, the management parameters useful to reach the drug system optimisation and the performance indicators to measure efficiency of approaches. KEYWORDS Conceptual framework, healthcare management, drug logistics.