Inventory management strategies for mitigating unfolding epidemics. Issue 3 (3rd July 2018) - Paul, Siddhartha
Abstract: This article provides a generic framework, comprising a hospital, forecasting, and an inventory management module for medicine stock management of any regional-level hospital during both regular and epidemic season. The performance of the proposed dynamic disease diffusion models with parameter update is compared against a traditional naïve forecasting policy. The disease diffusion forecasting models are found to outperform the naïve policy in terms of epidemic alleviation and inventory savings. Further analyses are carried out on choosing suitable ordering policies, quantifying the effect of key factors like safety stockpile and epidemic declaration threshold on the epidemic dynamics. The findings of this research are summarized and the managerial implications are derived for practical applications.