General Design and Assumptions
A simulation was built in order to model the hospital system and to gather results on the different scenarios. Each simulation was run for three years. First, there was no exchange system in place, in order to gather information on the base case. Then, the exchange system was implemented where the lower hospitals exchanged close to expiration products with the highest volume hospital. Transfer windows of two, five, ten, and twenty-five weeks were explored. The system tracked number of expirations, "stock-outs", and transfers, in total and per hospital. Stock-outs are the times when the hospitals ran out of the product. The simulation was set up to be easy to use and read for anyone wanting to run the simulations. It takes in a spreadsheet of parameters.
Parameters:
Assumptions:
Parameters:
- Patient Arrival Rate (in % of the base case)
- Product Life-time (in weeks)
- Inventory Level (in % of total average annual product use)
Assumptions:
- No natural phenomena/flux in patient arrivals due to catastrophe or seasons
- Base parameter values have no intrinsic value (not a known system)
- Ordered products have entire product lifetime remaining