مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The rapidly growing national healthcare expenditures (NHE) in the U.S. as well for developing countries are a significant issue in supply chain management (SCM) (Lee et al., 2011). Currently, information technology in healthcare systems has been receiving and deserves attention to evaluate the SC efficiency (Pai and Huang, 2011).

Healthcare providers in the United States and other nations are trying to respond to the tremendous pressure to reduce costs. Many attempts, however, are counterproductive, ultimately leading to higher costs and sometimes lower quality care (Kaplan and Haas, 2014). By 2020 supply chain will be the biggest hospital expense although today it is second (MH&L, 2015). MH&L (2015) surveyed healthcare supply chain executives and announced that over 80% agreed supply chain is extremely important for reaching profitability (89%) and revenue targets (83%), while 61% agreed cost reduction strategies in the supply chain have been extremely important in responding to customer pricing pressure. The increasing rate leads to focusing on cost reduction through hospital operational efficiency (Watcharasriroj and Tang, 2004).

To better understand the reasons why hospitals utilize SCM to reduce costs and improve efficiency and effectiveness through innovation, it is essential to analyze the various characteristics of how SCM affects performance. Innovation is a collective process of implementing ideas generated throughout resources, skills, and personnel within organizational functions and/or different organizations (Tatikonda and Rosenthal, 2000). Innovation makes it possible to achieve desired outcomes in a variety of settings (e.g., organizational performance, efficiency and/or effectiveness). Therefore, it is important to provide an environment in which healthcare leaders focus on innovation through various devices (e.g., IT applications, leadership, etc.) (Lee et al., 2011). Typically, new care services, new ways of patient care, or new technology represent innovation in healthcare systems (Länsisalmi et al., 2006). As expected, different SC require different techniques for each aspect of SCM, such as SC innovation based on hospital size. Since there is no one-size-fits-all SC, most hospital units operate multiple SCs. Thus, hospitals need to explore operations management strategies based on hospital size differences in SCM because of the importance of SC efficiency in the healthcare industry.