In Europe Health Organizations are progressively modifying their management models to rationalize expenditure in order to assure better levels of effectiveness and efficiency: many countries are going to centralize the management of goods and services supply. In this paper a specific model of centralized purchasing is proposed; it is particularly suitable in cases of severe economy suffering at regional level (e.g. Campania, Lazio, Calabria in Italy) or at national level (e.g. Greece, Ireland, Italy), that means in all those cases where the scale economies, obtainable by supply centralization, would be partly or totally compromised by the extra charges induced by the missing of contractual commitments. This work aims either to analyse such specific approach for centralized purchasing or to propose a simulation model based on Petri net, which could be useful for designing and managing similar case studies.

Abstract-The healthcare sector is very complex and healthcare managers have difficulty in describing the behavior of these systems. Management tools used by the managers of healthcare facilities, Business Intelligence for example, can help them to find the most suitable management solution in order to achieve the objectives that have been defined during the business planning phase, but they fail to fully describe the real workflow. This paper aims to develop a new operating paradigm that permits an improved definition of the operation of a healthcare structure by means of the adoption of simulated models based on Discrete Event Simulation (DES) theory in order to study its behavior and to obtain quantitative information about its activities and its use of human resources. The structure under scrutiny was the Hypertension Center of the "Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Federico II" of Naples.Index Terms-Business process management, discrete event simulation, healthcare process analysis, simulation in healthcare.

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