Comprehensive Literature Review about Drug Shortages in the Canadian Hospital's Pharmacy Supply Chain

Zwaida, Tarek Abu; Beauregard, Yvan; Elarroudi, Khalil

doi:10.1109/icesi.2019.8863026

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The shortage of antimicrobial drugs is critical as their shortages leading to delayed treatment, chronic infection, and other deadly outcomes (Fox et al, 2014). In addition, some drugs in the grey market become substandard with time as stored in non-optimal conditions and lead to compromised health outcomes (Fox et al, 2014;Zwaida et al, 2019).…”

Section: Clinical Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first time of drug scarcity in the record could be traced back to the insulin shortage in the early 1920s. Since then, the drug shortage is more common worldwide (Yang et al, 2016;Walker et al, 2017;Unguru et al, 2019;Zwaida et al, 2019). In 2012, Gray and Manasse found that 21 countries were affected by drug shortages (Russell et al, 2017), and the recent data of the University of Utah Drug Information Services reported 129 medicine shortages in the United States in 2020, as shown in Figure 1 (American Society of Health System Pharmacists, 2020, june 30).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Drug Shortage: Causes, Impact, and Mitigation Strategies

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drug shortage is a global issue affecting low, middle, and high-income countries. Many countries have developed various strategies to overcome the problem, while the problem is accelerating, affecting the whole world. All types of drugs, such as essential life-saving drugs, oncology medicines, antimicrobial drugs, analgesics, opioids, cardiovascular drugs, radiopharmaceutical, and parenteral products, are liable to the shortage. Among all pharmaceutical dosage forms, sterile injectable products have a higher risk of shortage than other forms. The causes of shortage are multifactorial, including supply issues, demand issues, and regulatory issues. Supply issues consist of manufacturing problems, unavailability of raw materials, logistic problems, and business problems. In contrast, demand issues include just-in-time inventory, higher demand for a product, seasonal demand, and unpredictable demand. For regulatory issues, one important factor is the lack of a unified definition of drug shortage. Drug shortage affects all stakeholders from economic, clinical, and humanistic aspects. WHO established global mitigation strategies from four levels to overcome drug shortages globally. It includes a workaround to tackle the current shortage, operational improvements to reduce the shortage risk and achieve early warning, changes in governmental policies, and education and training of all health professionals about managing shortages.

show abstract

Section: Clinical Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drug Shortage: Causes, Impact, and Mitigation Strategies

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The Canadian pharmaceutical supply chain, consisting of governments, manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, pharmacists, and physicians, acknowledges the significance of a reliable medication supply [27] Moreover, it is obvious that there is insufficient information for accessing the drugs due to different issues, for instance the distribution system of the manufacturing [28]. However, there are instances when drugs do not reach the intended locations due to glitches in the distribution system.…”

Section: Minimization Of Drug Shortages In Hospital Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimization of Inventory Management to Prevent Drug Shortages in the Hospital Supply Chain

2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drug shortage is always a critical issue of inventory management in healthcare systems since it potentially invokes several negative impacts. In supply chain management, optimization goes hand-in-hand with inventory control to address several issues of the supply, management, and use of drugs. However, it is difficult to determine a shortage situation in a hospital due to multiple unpredictable reasons, such as manufacturing problems, supply and demand issues, and raw material problems. To avoid the shortage problem in a hospital, efficient inventory management is required to operate the system in a sustainable way and maximize the profit of the organization in the Hospital Supply Chain (HSC). In this work, we study a drug refilling optimization problem, a general model for drug inventory management in a hospital. We then investigate a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model to address this problem under an online solution that can automatically make a drug refilling decision in order to prevent a drug shortage. We further present a numerical result to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, which outperforms the baselines (e.g., over-provisioning, ski-rental, and max-min) in terms of the refilling cost and the shortage rate.

show abstract