A model for the optimal design of the Hospital Drug Distribution Chain

The paper addresses the optimal design of the last branch of the pharmaceutical supply chain, i.e., the hospital drug distribution chain (HDDC), starting from suppliers till the patients of a department. Considering a distributed healthcare system composed of different stages connected by medicine and information links labeled with suitable performance indices, a procedure employing digraph modeling and mixed integer linear programming is presented to select the (sub)optimal HDDC configuration. The optimization model is applied under structural constraints to a case study describing an Italian healthcare regional distribution chain. The problem solution provides different HDDC structures allowing the improvement of the healthcare supply chain flexibility and performance.