| Author: | Zhang, Ping |
| Title: | Research study on healthcare management operations and marketing interface |
| Advisors: | Pang, King Wah Anthony (LMS) Yan, Hong (CPCE) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2022 |
| Subject: | Health services administration Health facilities -- Business management Hospitals -- Business management Business logistics Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies |
| Pages: | xiii, 111 pages : illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | This thesis studies three topics from the interface of Healthcare Operations Management (HOM) and marketing. Based on the major issues of the healthcare market: healthcare resources delivery, policymaking, and the interaction among multiple entities (such as the hospitals, drug manufacturers, retailers, and patients/consumers), this thesis conducts three detailed studies. The first study investigates the operation of the inventory sharing mechanism between two independent hospitals considering patients' behavior. When the stockout of rescue medical items happens in the hospital, compared with placing an expensive emergent replenishment order with the dealer, requesting inventory sharing from another hospital with enough stocks could save time and cost. We first identify the inventory decisions without hospitals' inventory sharing action and then derive hospitals' sharing decisions and inventory decisions under the sharing scenario. Through numerical experiments, we find that hospitals benefit from the inventory sharing option rather than the emergent replenishment policy. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of patients' behavior (patient's emergent request rate), the hospital's safety inventory level, and other cost parameters on inventory decisions. Under the sharing policy, when hospital j's emergent request rate or the safety inventory level increases, then hospital i's optimal initial inventory level increases, while the increase of hospital j's initial inventory level causes the decrease of hospital i's optimal inventory level. This study provides more practical suggestions for hospitals' inventory sharing operations. The second study explores the interaction between retailers' sharing action and return action for unused items in the consignment contract. Hospitals purchase medical supplies from the dealer on consignment contracts. Dealer provides a return policy for unused inventory but charges a return fee. Two hospitals could share inventory to reduce the amount of return to the dealer. Motivated by this consignment contract policy for the medical supply chain, we develop a framework (a common dealer and two independent retailers) that considers retailers' sharing action and return problems. We aim at developing a coordinating mechanism to manage the retailers' sharing and return action. The dealer-dominated sharing and retailer-dominated sharing are compared from the perspective of sharing performance and expected profits. We analyze the condition that the dealer is better off from retailers' sharing when the dealer has the power to encourage retailers' sharing. We further explore the dealer's trading preference for an individual retailer or cooperative retailers when the dealer has no power to encourage retailers' sharing. Numerical experiments are conducted to examine the sensitivity of retailers' sharing decisions, retailers' profits, and dealer's profit to the return price. In the third study, we develop a three-echelon model to study the interaction among the upstream manufacturer, the downstream pharmacy benefit manager (PBM), and the consumers in the pharmaceutical supply chain. The PBM provides a drug at the wholesale price to the insurance company and benefits as an intermediary between the drug manufacturer and the insurance company. To increase the influence on distribution channels, the drug manufacturer considers the vertical integration with the PBM based on the direct retail strategy. First, we obtain the equilibrium solution of drug quality decision and pricing decision when there exist the direct retail channel and vertical integration channel simultaneously. Second, from the manufacturer's perspective, we consider the quality differentiation level between the vertical integration channel and the direct retail channel. Then, we divide the integration cases into low-quality and high-quality vertical integration cases. Furthermore, we examine the effect of quality differentiation level on consumer performance (co-payment and demand for the drug) and the joint profit of the PBM and manufacturer. We find that consumers do not always choose the drug with high-level quality from the vertical integration channel. The co-payment level also increases with the increasing quality differentiation level. Additionally, the joint profit of the manufacturer and PBM does not always decrease with the increasing manufacturing cost. As the quality differentiation level increases, PBM sets a higher retail price to offset the increased manufacturing cost. This study provides some managerial suggestions for pharmaceutical implications through numerical experiments. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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