Supply chain partnership assessment of a diabetes clinic
International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance
ISSN: 0952-6862
Article publication date: 9 July 2018
Abstract
Purpose
Diabetes is one of the major healthcare challenges in India. The chronic nature of the disease makes the lifetime cost of the treatment exorbitantly high. The medicine cost contributes a major size of expense in diabetes management. To make healthcare available to poorest of the poor, it is imperative to control the rising cost of diabetes treatment. The earlier research works done in this area focuses more on inventory management techniques to control the cost of healthcare. Less interest is shown in the role of better supply chain partnership (SCP) in reducing the cost of procurement of medicine. The purpose of this paper is to develop and use the SCP assessment framework for a diabetes clinic. The approach is generalized enough to be adopted for other similar organization.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper adopts self-assessment criteria of the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) business excellence model for analysis of SCP in the supply chain of a private diabetes clinic in Varanasi. The paper uses analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method for calculation of weights of criteria.
Findings
The EFQM-based framework can be adopted as easy-to-use tool to make an objective assessment of the SCP. The proposed model in the study is a balanced model between enablers and results, which includes multiple assessment dimensions. The supply chain performance score of the diabetes clinic under study was found as the Tool Pusher, which means the effort in direction of SCP is not too good. The organization needs to clearly define the SCP goal and analyze the results to identify the gap areas.
Originality/value
The study is first of its kind and contributes to the literature by providing non-prescriptive and easy-to-use SCP assessment framework, for chronic disease care. The case study approach provides a procedure for the healthcare organization willing to adopt this approach.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
There is not any conflict of interest to report.
Citation
Mishra, V., Samuel, C. and Sharma, S.K. (2018), "Supply chain partnership assessment of a diabetes clinic", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 31 No. 6, pp. 646-658. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHCQA-06-2017-0113
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited