Using GA to dispatch the obtaining quantity for minimizing the total cost based on consideration of patient safety in HSCM

The objective of this paper is to study how to minimize the total system cost (TSC) when patient safety is considered in the hospital's supply chain management (HSCM). Owing to the HSCM explored in material flow, service level (S.L) is used as the index of patient safety level in this paper. HSCM includes three hospitals and a centralized purchasing center (CPC). A genetic algorithm (GA) is applied in the CPC to compute the dispatched quantity for each hospital. The results show that the CPC coordinates the total obtaining quantity for each hospital and assists the hospital's decision makers to estimate the total cost for each hospital. Also, the sensitivity analysis shows that to increase the same S.L for each hospital, these three hospitals should have almost the same incremental total cost when one unit quantity is dispatched.