Due to the economic crisis and the\npredominance of drug expenditure in healthcare costs,\nthe cooperation of groups of hospitals to negotiate with\nsuppliers and centralize warehouses has been a recent\ntrend in the pharmaceutical supply chain.\nThis paper shows the economic convenience of\ncentralizing the hospitals� inventory decisions (how\nmuch/when to order) based on the sharing of medical\nprescriptions of patients along the supply chain.\nThe logistic network under investigation (TO BE model)\nintegrates: a central pharmacy negotiating with suppliers,\ncollecting hospital orders, storing and distributing\nmaterials; a number of hospitals feeding their medical\nunits with materials; and a number of medical units\ntaking care of their patients.\nThe study is carried out comparing the cost performances\nof the proposed model with a non-cooperative one(in\nwhich hospitals manage their stocks individually) by\nmeans of simulation.
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