Call for papers: Smart and Sustainable Healthcare Supply Chain

A special issue of International Journal of Procurement Management

Healthcare is a complex industry which is now facing major changes in its structure and its organisation (Agarwal et al., 2010). The global attention to healthcare issues is growing along with the resources allocated to this area (OECD, 2010).

 Nevertheless, the financial crisis which is hitting Europe and other countries is also imposing a rationalisation of the resources allocated to healthcare services – which are perceived by most of the people as highly inefficient. On the other hand, due to its relevance, the healthcare system must not only pursue efficiency but must also consider the central role of the patient and the quality of health treatments and the environmental impacts of the adopted choices. Currently the main challenge faced by the healthcare service concerns the continuous support of a synergistic combination of:

•  streamlining the cost of healthcare processes (OECD, 2007) - economic performance;
•  increase of the quality of healthcare processes (IoM, 2001, 2012) - social and environmental performance.

 The problem is that these goals are very difficult to achieve simultaneously. If healthcare organisations are too focused on finding new and better ways to provide care, as happened historically, healthcare costs would dramatically increase. On the other hand, when exaggerating with the emphasis on cost streamlining, the quality of healthcare services would fall dangerously below the acceptability levels. Most providers and healthcare systems are trying to reconfigure themselves and innovate their processes to manage the trade-off between cost reduction on the one hand and service quality and satisfaction of patients on the other hand.

 While there are studies on healthcare supply chain in the literature, most of them are anecdotal, based on empirical or case studies. There is a dearth of papers that take a rigorous modelling approach to produce general analytical results. This Special Issue is open to researchers throughout the world who are interested in applying advanced research in process reengineering, lean organisation and ICT-driven innovation in the healthcare supply chain (HSC), to address significant research issues pertinent to HSC. The objective of this call is to gain a deep insight on how a healthcare organisation can initiate, sustain and feed paths of innovation that connote the organisation as sustainable and smart, focusing on the improvement opportunities, on the enabling or inhibiting factors for their application and on the levers for implementing these interventions.

Topics suitable for this SI include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Analysis of performance evaluation of HSC
• Exploration and experimentation of management procedures, organisational methodologies and technological solutions in the HSC
• Modelling and analysis of innovation for HSC
• Optimisation of reverse logistics and closed loop supply chains
• Optimisation of sustainability of the healthcare services in terms of lower costs, faster response times, better service quality, efficient and effective use of resources
• Analysis of the risks associated to the introduction of new technologies and processes for procurement, management and disposal/recovery in the HSC
• Exploration of the concept of smart and sustainable hospital in terms of ICT-driven innovations.

We aim to publish high quality research papers that employ a variety of rigorous and pertinent research methodologies such as optimisation, simulation, metaheuristics etc with extensive numerical results.

Important Dates
Deadline for submission of complete manuscripts: 28 February 2013 (extended)
Anticipated date for provision of first round decision to authors: 15 May, 2013
Deadline for submission of revised manuscripts: 15 August, 2013
Provision of final decisions: 15 October, 2013