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To perform diagnosis and treatment, health systems, hospitals, and other patient care facilities require a wide range of supplies, from masks and gloves to catheters and implants. The “healthcare supply chain/healthcare operation management” refers to the stakeholders, systems, and processes required to move products from the manufacturer to the patient’s bedside. The ultimate goal of the healthcare supply chain is to ensure that the right products, in the right quantities, are available in the right places at the right time to support patient care. Hospitals and the concept of a healthcare delivery system are practically synonymous. Surgical services, emergency and disaster services, and inpatient care are the three main types of services they offer. Outpatient clinics and facilities are also available at some hospitals, where patients can receive specialty consultations and surgical services. There will always be a need for inpatient care, regardless of how care models develop. The focus of this monograph was on recent OM work that models the dynamic, interrelated effects of demand-supply matching in the ED, OR, and inpatient units. Decisions about staffing and scheduling in these areas are frequently made independently by healthcare managers and clinicians. Then, as demand changes in real-time, clinicians and managers retaliate as best as they can to reallocate staffing to the areas that require it most at a particular moment in time in order to relieve patient flow bottlenecks. We, as OM researchers, must create models that help healthcare administrators enhance OR scheduling policies, ED demand forecasting, and medium- and short-term staffing plans that consider the interdependence of how demand develops. Full article

The sustainability of the mask emergency supply chain faces two problems during the current COVID-19 pandemic. First, mask manufacturers are mainly small and mid-size enterprises, resulting in a lack of funds and credit lines for the introduction of equipment. Second, the periodicity and uncertainty of pandemics create overcapacity risk for the mask emergency supply chain. To solve these problems, this study incorporates financial leasing institutions and the government into the mask emergency supply chain. Based on a questionnaire survey of practitioners of financial leasing institutions, the relationship between mask manufacturers, financial leasing institutions, and the government in the mask supply chain is analyzed through a game model, and the behavior of mask manufacturers to reduce the scale of mask production after the occurrence of overcapacity is investigated using the cusp catastrophe theory. We find that in the case of masks’ overcapacity, mask manufacturers tend to continue production. Finally, we propose that financial leasing institutions should lease mask production equipment to mask manufacturers under the guarantee of the government and develop a mechanism for the three parties to jointly share the risk of mask overcapacity, aiming at ensuring the sustainable manufacturing of masks during the pandemic. Full article

Incorporating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mask supply chain into our framework and taking mask output as a state variable, our study introduces the differential game to study the long-term dynamic cooperation of a two-echelon supply chain composed of the supplier and the manufacturer under government subsidies. The study elaborates that government subsidies can provide more effective incentives for supply chain members to cooperate in the production of masks compared with the situation of no government subsidies. A relatively low wholesale price can effectively increase the profits of supply chain members and the supply chain system. The joint contract of two-way cost-sharing contract and transfer payment contract can promote production technology investment efforts of the supply chain members, the optimum trajectory of mask production, and total profit to reach the best state as the centralized decision scenario within a certain range. Meanwhile, it is determined that the profits of supply chain members in the joint contract can be Pareto improvement compared with decentralized decision scenario. With the increase of production technology investment cost coefficients and output self-decay rate, mask outputs have shown a downward trend in the joint contract decision model. On the contrary, mask outputs would rise with growing sensitivity of mask output to production technology investment effort and increasing sensitivity of mask demand to mask output. Full article