Logistics in the Health Care System: The Case of Greek Hospitals

Medical logistics is used as a tool for measuring performance and improving operations and is a topic of worldwide increasing importance. In Greece the implementation of such applications is relatively limited and there is therefore a significant scope for study. The fact that the cost of health care treatment has substantially increased over time due to over-spending of medical supplies, makes the need of identifying the factors which lead to such situations imperative. The research presented in this paper is a first attempt to identify the level of awareness of logistics that hospitals in Greece have. In fact, recently the majority of the larger Greek hospitals faced serious deficiencies in medical supplies due to their insolvency. The purpose of this paper is to examine the distribution process of supplies, the amount or the volume of distributed medicines and the degree of partnerships between Greek hospitals and their vendors. In addition, we monitor the extent of responsibility given to the logistics departments (if they do exist) with respect to purchasing, inventory management, internal distribution to medical departments and management information systems.