Inventory Management at a Chilean Hospital Pharmacy: Case Study of a Dynamic Decision-Aid Tool

Pharmacy inventory management is a critical process in healthcare centers. On the one hand, effective drug procurement is fundamental for fulfilling the therapeutic requirements of patients. On the other hand, as hospital pharmacies' purchasing and storage costs comprise an important share in the hospital budgets, efficient inventory management may play a central role in operational cost containment. Therefore, healthcare centers should design and implement decision-aid strategies for planning the purchase of drugs with the aim of avoiding excessive purchasing volumes and optimizing warehouse capacity, while also meeting forecast demand and ensuring critical stock levels. In this study, we present the methodological features of a decision-aid tool for planning the purchases and inventory levels for the controlled medication pharmacy of the Regional Hospital of Talca, Chile. We report the results obtained after 1 year of operation; these results show that our strategy produced more than 7% savings compared to the regular inventory planning strategy and was more effective in preserving critical stock levels. Furthermore, from a computational point of view, our strategy outperforms a recently published approach for a similar application.