A decision support system for demand management in healthcare supply chains considering the epidemic outbreaks: A case study of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Abstract

The disasters caused by epidemic outbreaks is different from other disasters due to two specific features: their long-term disruption and their increasing propagation. Not controlling such disasters brings about severe disruptions in the supply chains and communities and, thereby, irreparable losses will come into play. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is one of these disasters that has caused severe disruptions across the world and in many supply chains, particularly in the healthcare supply chain. Therefore, this paper, for the first time, develops a practical decision support system based on physicians' knowledge and fuzzy inference system (FIS) in order to help with the demand management in the healthcare supply chain, to reduce stress in the community, to break down the COVID-19 propagation chain, and, generally, to mitigate the epidemic outbreaks for healthcare supply chain disruptions. This approach first divides community residents into four groups based on the risk level of their immune system (namely, very sensitive, sensitive, slightly sensitive, and normal) and by two indicators of age and pre-existing diseases (such as diabetes, heart problems, or high blood pressure). Then, these individuals are classified and are required to observe the regulations of their class. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed approach was measured in the real world using the information from four users and the results showed the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach.

Agriculture supply chain risks and COVID-19: mitigation strategies and implications for the practitioners

“…Rizou et al (2020) investigate the potential impacts of COVID-19 on the food supply chains pertaining to food safety. Govindan, Mina, and Alavi (2020) report the impact of COVID-19 related to disruption management in healthcare supply chains. The present study differs from other studies as we have estimated the impact of risks induced by COVID-19 on ASCs using empirical investigation.…”

“…COVID-19 has severely impacted all countries in the world 1 and has caused several supply chain disruptions globally (Ivanov 2020;Choi 2020;Govindan, Mina, and Alavi 2020). The current pandemic COVID-19 has inflicted an economic shock across so drastic that it has been compared with the Great Depression of the 1930s as more than 170 countries will experience a negative per capita GDP growth (IMF 2020).…”

Covid-19 Pandemic: Early Implications for North European Manufacturing and Logistics

“…Ivanov [31] has made a simulation model which aims to predict the effect of Covid-19 on global supply chains. Furthermore, healthcare supply chain decision-support systems during the Covid-19 epidemic has been a research focus of Govindan et al [32].…”

Fast prototyping of a local fuzzy search system for decision support and retraining of hospital staff during pandemic

“…To assist physicians, research groups in IT started developing decision support systems (DSS) to mitigate different aspects of the pandemic. Thus, paper [2] investigates the issues of constructing a simple patient condition severity classifier based on remote survey data to adjust medical logistics. System [3] developed by Sapio Analytics is planned as a tool to optimize quarantine regime.…”