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Effective Medical Surplus Recovery
Author(s) -
Atasu Atalay,
Toktay Beril,
Yeo Wee Meng,
Zhang Can
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
production and operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.279
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1937-5956
pISSN - 1059-1478
DOI - 10.1111/poms.12641
Subject(s) - business , economic surplus , profit (economics) , competition (biology) , work (physics) , operations management , health care , value (mathematics) , resource (disambiguation) , marketing , environmental economics , microeconomics , economics , computer science , welfare , economic growth , mechanical engineering , ecology , computer network , machine learning , engineering , market economy , biology
We analyze not‐for‐profit Medical Surplus Recovery Organizations (MSROs) that manage the recovery of surplus (unused or donated) medical products to fulfill the needs of underserved healthcare facilities in the developing world. Our work is inspired by an award‐winning North American non‐governmental organization (NGO) that matches the uncertain supply of medical surplus with the receiving parties’ needs. In particular, this NGO adopts a recipient‐driven resource allocation model, which grants recipients access to an inventory database, and each recipient selects products of limited availability to fill a container based on its preferences. We first develop a game theoretic model to investigate the effectiveness of this approach. This analysis suggests that the recipient‐driven model may induce competition among recipients and lead to a loss in value provision through premature orders. Further, contrary to the common wisdom from traditional supply chains, full inventory visibility in our setting may accelerate premature orders and lead to loss of effectiveness. Accordingly, we identify operational mechanisms to help MSROs deal with this problem. These are: (i) appropriately selecting container capacities while limiting the inventory availability visible to recipients and increasing the acquisition volumes of supplies, (ii) eliminating recipient competition through exclusive single‐recipient access to MSRO inventory, and (iii) focusing on learning recipient needs as opposed to providing them with supply information, and switching to a provider‐driven resource allocation model. We use real data from the NGO by which the study was inspired and show that the proposed improvements can substantially increase the value provided to recipients.