Logistics Improvement Strategy for Medical Units following the Lean Approach

Abstract

The logistics portrayed in medical environments is a field which is not usually visible towards patients, but directly affects the health service quality, so it is a very important aspect for healthcare organizations to take into account. Hospital logistics are in charge of managing the supply of drugs, equipment, materials, laundry and sometimes even the food catering, through transport, storing and heavy organization skills. This final degree project focuses on the elaboration of a new scheme for improving the logistics set behind Hospital Clinics' medical units, this being the management and supply chain of medical material and other items the hospital makes use of, by adopting more sophisticated technology. The improvement plan basically comes down to automating the systems used in the warehouse and storage rooms by using the popular Lean approach designed by the Japanese Toyota company in the mid 90s. In the paper, several Lean management and healthcare techniques are used - to study, analyse and advance the current logistics, the goal is to automate the main warehouse with robotic load systems and to pre set the current faulty Kanban used in the storage rooms with a new and improved Smart Kanban technique, based on radiofrequency and more advanced technology. The project verifies the necessity of biomedical engineers to not only provide a critical engineering point of view towards the systems used in hospital environments, but also to improve the lack of communication between the logistics team and the rest of the medical departments, which is a serious issue.