Why is healthcare supply chain management so complex?

    The supply chain management of healthcare has its distinctive features as every stakeholder is responsible of its duty to protect the patient according to their interests. The stages of smoothly flow of supply chain is focused as depend on their goals. Moreover, providers play their role as the are trained about the use of medical products depending on the need and the top management of hospitals has their own goals to purchase the high-quality products in an affordable range.

    It is not necessary that the goals of supply chain meet with the organization because the process of management of healthcare supply chain may not efficient and fragmented. So, the healthcare organizations should consider the all aspects, view-points and requests to settle down for the budget of medical product which is important.

    In the healthcare supply chain management process, the patients have the voice. However, it is responsibility of healthcare organization to check the size of gloves on regular basis and stored them. Moreover, in hospitals some patients according to their health status required more medical products to improve their health status.

Therefore, providers in the healthcare center give prefer to the medical product of specific brand which creates the cost related issues which could exceed the budget.

    As the providers prefer the special brand of medical product according to their priorities which is difficult for managers of financial department and they want to decrease the number of expired medical products which is in actual the wastage of money.

    According to Spann, clinicians required only those medical products which they needed on the time. To make sure that, this condition occurred when they advertisement of their clinics and supplies of products are their own. This practice lead towards the different cost and the not contract with any purchasing organization and it is difficult to uncover the cost of this off contract. The other cost which is not visible is that time which is spent for suppliers to deliver the product which they demand.

    Therefore, different aims and goals as well as the different incentives are affecting the smooth flow of healthcare supply chain within the organization.