The preference card is a list of all items and their quantity that a surgeon requires in the OR when performing a given procedure (Young & Conley, 1988). Especially when it comes to the OR, management of surgical supplies and instruments is highly affected by the surgeon “preference card”. In addition, most hospitals lack a standardised process to manage materials. This leads to a conflict between inventory managers, who are attempting to lower inventory costs, and surgeons in the OR, who expect to have everything on hand (Reis & Fontaine, 1993). One of the difficulties of inventory management in an OR in comparison to a manufacturing setting is the trade-off between inventory costs and level of required service (availability of the supplies) that each surgeon expects to receive (De Vries, 2011). OR inventory needs to be stocked in multiple locations and generally contains more items compared to other hospital inventories (Melson & Schultz, 1989). There exist some general reviews in application of operations research/management in healthcare (Fakhimi & Probert, 2013 Hulshof, Kortbeek, Boucherie, Hans, & Bakker, 2012 Rais & Vianaa, 2011), healthcare supply chain management (De Vries & Huijsman, 2011 Dobrzykowski, Saboori Deilami, Hong, & Kim, 2014), and hospital material logistics (Volland, Fügener, Schoenfelder, & Brunner, 2016), but these reviews do not deal with the unique challenges associated with operating room inventories. Despite numerous research studies and practitioners’ reports on the management of OR inventories, which play a significant role in hospital costs and wastes, to the best of our knowledge, there is no comprehensive review dedicated to OR inventory management of surgical supplies and sterile instruments. In an OR, in order to reduce cost through efficient utilisation of capacity, as well as enhance revenue by performing more cases, two domains have been studied: (1) planning and scheduling of resources see extensive reviews of Cardoen, Demeulemeester, and Beliën ( 2010), Guerriero and Guido ( 2011), Demeulemeester, Beliën, Cardoen, and Samudra ( 2013), Erhard, Schoenfelder, Fügener, and Brunner ( 2017) and (2) inventory management of surgical supplies and sterile instruments. Therefore any systematic cost reduction in ORs would significantly impact the nation’s economy. Hospital operating rooms (ORs) are cost centres, which are responsible for about 60% of total hospital cost (Weiss et al., 2016), although they generate a large proportion of the hospital’s revenue as well (Cardoen, Beliën, & Vanhoucke, 2015). This report also indicated that hospitals represented 32% of national health expenditures in 2015. According to a report published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS, 2015), healthcare expenditures in the USA are growing at an average rate of 5.8% per year, 1.3% faster than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and are projected to account for about 20.1% of the GDP by 2025.
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