A decision support system for localisation and inventory management in healthcare

In the last years, the Italian healthcare system is facing significant challenges, which underline the serious need for radical changes. Indeed, there is broad evidence that, even though a huge amount of money is invested in healthcare services every year, the patients often do not get the care they need. Thus, reforming the healthcare delivery system is mandatory, to ensure high-care quality at reasonable cost. It is evident that Information Technologies can play a central role in supporting decision makers in improving healthcare services. In this work, we present a Decision Support System (DSS) embedding localization and inventory optimisation models defined to address two types of problems arising in healthcare. The first is of strategic type and refers to hospitals' localization and healthcare service network reorganization. The second is of operational type and it deals with the inventory management of hospital pharmacies and departments, that are part of the current network. The proposed DSS can be an useful tool to take decisions both at strategic and operational level.