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The purposes of this study are to first, determine the most efficient and cost effective portions of the healthcare supply chain in which radio frequency identification devices (RFID) can be implemented. Second, provide specific examples of RFID implementation and show how these business applications will add to the effectiveness of the healthcare supply chain. And third, to describe the current state of RFID technology and to give practical information for managers in the healthcare sector to make sound decisions about the possible implementation of RFID technology within their organizations.

Healthcare industry literature was reviewed and examples of specific instances of RFID implementation were examined using an integrated simulation model developed with Excel, @Risk and Visio software tools.

Analysis showed that the cost of implementing current RFID technology is too expensive for broad and sweeping implementation within the healthcare sector at this time. However, several example applications have been identified in which this technology can be effectively leveraged in a cost‐effective way.

This study shows that RFID technology has come a long way in the recent past and has potential to improve healthcare sector productivity and efficiency. Implementation by large companies such as Wal‐mart has helped to make the technology become much more economical in its per unit cost as well as its supporting equipment and training costs.

The originality of this study lies in the idea that few practical and pragmatic approaches have been taken within the academic field of study for the implementation of RFID into the healthcare supply chain. Much of the research has focused on specific companies or portions of the supply chain and not the entire supply chain. Also, many of the papers have discussed the future of the supply chain that is heavily dependent on advances in RFID technology. A few viable applications of how RFID technology can be implemented in the healthcare supply chain are presented and how the current state of technology limits the broad use and implementation of this technology in the healthcare industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and consequences of a value-dense environment in healthcare service delivery.

A structural model was developed based on a literature review. Circulation of a 31-indicator questionnaire among service receivers in the healthcare system across India generated 279 valid responses. The research model was assessed using a cross-sectional research design, and the data were analyzed by partial least squares-structural equation modeling.

Integrated supply chain performance (ISCP), internal service quality (ISQ) and coordinated care are antecedents of a value-dense environment, which drives patient-centricity. The leagile supply chain strategy strengthens the relationship between ISCP and coordinated care. Employee trust and commitment acts as a moderator between coordinated care and ISQ.

By adopting the perspective of service receivers, this paper highlights the influence of value-density on patient-centricity in healthcare organizations. Future research should include healthcare professionals’ perceptions of value-dense environment creation.

The study provides suggestions to practitioners for designing patient-centric healthcare services by leveraging ISCP, coordinated care and ISQ in the value-creation process. Recognizing the relationships among these constructs can aid the timely formulation of corrective actions and future policies.

This study underscores patient-centric care as a basis for effectively delivering healthcare as a social good.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by identifying and empirically validating the relationships between patient-centricity and value co-creation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal linkages among supply chain practices, effectiveness of supply chain performance (SCP) and organizational performance (OP) in Indian healthcare industries.

This paper is helpful in developing a framework for linking a healthcare supply chain practice to its OP, and thus identifies how such a linkage can be connected to the effectiveness of SCP. Such effort also enables the authors to derive a set of recommended supply chain practices for SC performance.

From the literature review, this paper finds that, in the context of Indian healthcare industries, efficient SC performance may play a critical role for overall OP improvement, as there is a close interrelationship between supply chain management (SCM) practices and SCP that may have a more significant effect on OP improvement.

The principle limitation of the paper is that it is performed only in a particular industry and with a questionnaire survey which could be extended in future for other industries also. Another limitation of the paper is that it is focused only on the SCP of medical device and equipment supply chain which is a small portion of the whole healthcare supply chain, and therefore requires further research covering various other domains of healthcare supply chain. Another limitation of the study is that the sample survey has been taken from only one respondent per company at one point of time which may create biasness in the results. Thus, future research should collect data through multiple members from the organization.

This study contributes to know the effect of SCM practices on healthcare SCP and provides a practical and useful tool to evaluate the extent of effectiveness of SCP and finally their impact on the healthcare OP. Finally, this study provides conceptual and descriptive literature regarding SCM practices that leads to improvement in healthcare performance.

This study adds to the knowledge on healthcare SCM performance by exploring the relationship between supply chain practices, healthcare SCP and healthcare OP and by developing and testing a research framework thus help in improving patient satisfaction.

This study attempts to show how the potential benefits of supply chain practices can no longer be ignored in healthcare supply chain.

Quality and value are currently convergent concepts in healthcare. The importance of patients as customers has increased the focus on quality management and value delivery. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Rotorua is a specialist hospital for rheumatic disease and rehabilitation. It has a clear mission for the delivery of customer quality and in fulfilling this mission uses a holistic approach (a value chain approach) to customer care. The value chain study of QEH’s product/service delivery has enabled medical, medical support staff and management to review both value delivery quality and delivery methods. The study explored the QEH value chain organisation and process structures and has identified questions concerning healthcare delivery and alternative methods for achieving current results and the future direction of the organisation. Value chain analysis encourages an intra‐ and inter‐organisational review of resource application and identifies alternative methods and structures for meeting objectives.

The purpose of this paper is to use a systems lens to assess the comparative performance of healthcare supply chains and provide guidance for their improvement.

A well-established and rigorous multi-method audit methodology, based on the uncertainty circle model, yields an objective assessment of value stream performance in eight Australasian public sector hospitals. Cause-effect analysis identifies the major barriers to achieving smooth, seamless flows. Potentially high-leverage remedial actions identified using systems thinking are examined with the aid of an exemplar case.

The majority of the healthcare value streams studied are underperforming compared with those in the European automotive industry. Every public hospital appears to be caught in the grip of vicious circles of system uncertainty, in large part being caused by problems of their own making. The single exception is making good progress towards seamless functional integration, which has been achieved by elevating supply chain management to a core competence; having a clearly articulated supply chain vision; adopting a systems approach; and, managing supplies with accurate information.

The small number of cases limits the generalisability of the findings at this time.

Hospital supply chain managers endeavouring to achieve smooth and seamless supply flows should attempt to elevate the status of supplies management within their organisation to that of a core competence, and should use accurate information to manage their value streams holistically as a set of interwoven processes. A four-level prism model is proposed as a useful framework for thus improving healthcare supply delivery systems.

Material flow concepts originally developed to provide objective assessments of value stream performance in commercial settings are adapted for use in a healthcare setting. The ability to identify exemplar organisations via a context-free uncertainty measure, and to use systems thinking to identify high-leverage solutions, supports the transfer of appropriate best practices even between organisations in dissimilar business and economic settings.

Indian healthcare system, especially in rural regions, faces several problems that prevent it from achieving universal and sustainable healthcare coverage. The purpose of this paper is to capture such problems through expert opinions and provide solution concepts that are derived from other similar scenarios.

Delphi study has been conducted with 38 experts from diverse areas related to the Indian healthcare sector. Nineteen theses were formulated based on the discussion with experts and were reconfirmed through intensive desktop research. Finally, theses were subjected to expert panel member’s evaluation.

The pool of arguments provided by the participating experts included 415 written statements explaining the (dis-)agreement with the theses. The experts achieved consensus in six theses with interquartile ranges smaller or equal to 20. The written arguments provided by experts were summarized into five different categories, namely interrelations/dependencies in healthcare, inequalities in healthcare, lack of proactive measures, importance of healthcare personnel and role of government in healthcare. Finally, a framework is proposed mapping the issues identified at different stages of the healthcare value chain. Problem-based cost allocation and hub-and-spoke model are discussed as potential solutions for the issues identified.

Lack of empirical and statistical data on the effective cost arising from the present issues suggests future research to determine these expenses and therefore examine the feasibility of applying the problem-based cost allocation framework discussed in this study.

Results show that merely targeting the supply side of healthcare falls short of the mark, especially in a country, such as India, with large socio-economic differentials. Healthcare system, hence, should be viewed from a market perspective, taking both forces of supply and demand into consideration.

This study intends to allow for a comprehensive approach to identify the issues in Indian healthcare system by reviewing the existing key studies in literature and validating it through empirical inputs from experts in the domain. Based on the validation, a framework is proposed mapping the issues identified at different stages of the healthcare value chain.

The purpose of this study is to develop a methodology for the identification, categorization and prioritization of operational government-supported healthcare supply chain barriers (GHSCBs).

This study develops a theoretical background for identifying and segregating relevant GHSCBs and proposes a 5W2H (a Toyota production system) with fuzzy DEcision MAking Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) embedded approach to quantify the causal–effect relationships among the identified operational GHSCBs.

Seven GHSCBs (i.e. uncertainty of demand management, lack of continuous improvement and learning, lack of deadline management, lack of social audit, warehousing equipment unavailability, human resource shortage and inadequate top level monitoring) were identified as significant cause group where the government, top management and decision-makers of government-supported healthcare supply chain (GHSC) have to put efforts.

The results obtained are specific to the GHSC of Indian perspective, which could be extended to global context. However, the proposed approach can be a base and provide a platform to understand and analyze the interactions among GHSCBs.

The proposed methodology will show the appropriate areas for allocating efforts and resources to mitigate the impact of GHSCBs for successful implementation of healthcare supply chain.

According to best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study of operational barrier for GHSC in India in specific. The use of 5W2H embedded fuzzy DEMATEL approach for the development and analysis of the theoretical framework of Indian GHSCBs is unique in barrier literature.

This paper aims to understand the specific role of value chain flexibility (VCF) in the strategies of green service production (GSP) in healthcare. The study explores the key dimensions of VCF and their linkages with the current GSP strategies in healthcare firms.

The study uses an exploratory case study with three representative national-level healthcare firms in India. A multiple case study methodology was utilized to explore the relationships between GSP and VCF.

The findings of the study suggest that several strategies for GSP require the support of multiple dimensions of VCF. More importantly, the role of each dimension of VCF depends upon the innovativeness of green service design, green procurement and green service practices.

The study was conducted in the emerging healthcare market of India. Thus, the generalizability of the framework needs to be tested in another context. The study reports the employee's perception, and the patients’ (customers) views were not included.

The study is a first step to understand the theoretical perspectives of the relationships between GSP and VCF by exploring the underlying concepts. Furthermore, the study explicates the dynamics of their interplay in a systematic way and contributes to a framework of GSP and VCF in the healthcare context.

Interorganizational business process standards (IBPS) are IT-enabled process specifications that standardize, streamline, and improve business processes related to interorganizational relationships. There has been much interest in IBPS as organizations from different industries implement these process standards that lead to successful organizational outcomes by integrating and standardizing intra- and inter-organizational business processes. These process standards enable data analytics capabilities by facilitating new sources of interorganizational process data. The purpose of this paper is to unearth employees’ reactions to a new type of supply chain process innovations that involved an implementation of new IBPS, a supply chain management (SCM) system, and associated analytics capabilities.

The authors gathered and analyzed qualitative data for a year from the employees of a healthcare supplier, a high-tech manufacturing organization, during the implementation of a SCM system and RosettaNet-based IBPS.

In what the authors termed the initiation stage, there was quite a bit of confusion and unrest among employees regarding the relevance of the new process standards and associated analytics capabilities. With the passage of time, in the institutionalization stage, although the situation improved slightly, employees found workarounds that allowed them to appropriate just part of specific processes and the analytics capabilities. Finally, once routinized, employees felt comfortable in the situation but still did not appropriate the new supply chain processes faithfully. Overall, employees’ reactions toward the SCM system and associated analytics capabilities were different from their reactions toward the new business processes.

The paper contributes to the literature by offering novel insights on how employees react to and appropriate process innovations that change their work processes.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new outsourcing model for materials management related to the operating theatre of hospitals. Two distinguishing features characterize the model: the long-term collaborative network established among the supplying companies (the “Network factor”), and the implementation of the RFID technology along the supply chain (the “RFID factor”). The network factor allows sharing transportation costs, while the RFID factor allows implementing a continuous review policy, instead of the periodic review policy normally utilized in hospitals. In the paper the effect of these two factors on the minimization of total materials management costs is investigated.

An analytical model, validated through a simulation study, is proposed to calculate total management costs of materials, depending on the presence of the network and the RFID factors. Throughout the model it is possible to perform a scenario analysis and individuate the inventory management policy that allows minimizing total costs. The procedure has been applied to a real case study of a long-term collaborative network of supplying companies in the healthcare sector that operates in Central Italy.

The optimal inventory management policy strongly depends on the mutual distances of supplying companies and the hospital. Both of the two factors have an impact on the reduction of total annual costs. The analysis of the scenario shows that a positive interaction effect exists between the two factors, so that higher savings are obtained when both factors are present.

The outsourcing model presented in the paper is new, and the managerial insights that can be drawn from the application of the model to the healthcare sector can be extended to many other industries.