Facilitating patient-centric thinking in hospital facility management: a case of pharmaceutical inventory

Conventional hospital facility management (FM) focused on reasonably allocating various resources to support core healthcare services from the perspectives of the FM department and hospital. However, since patients are the main service targets in hospitals, the patients’ demographic and hospitalization information can be integrated to support the patient-centric FM, aiming at a higher level of patient satisfaction than the core healthcare services. Taking the pharmaceutical services in hospital inpatient departments as the case study, forecasting the pharmaceutical demands based on the admitted patients’ information contributes not only to better logistics management and cost containment, but also to securing the medical requirements of individual patients. In patient-centric FM thinking, the pharmacy inventory is regarded as the combination of medical resources reserved and allocated to each admitted patient. Two forecasting models are trained to predict the inpatients’ total medical requirement at the beginning of the hospitalization and rectify the patients’ length of stay after early treatment. Specifically, once a patient is admitted to the hospital, certain amounts of medical resources are reserved according to the inpatient’s gender, age, diagnosis, and the preliminary expected days in the hospital. The allocated inventory is updated after the early treatment, by rectifying the inpatient’s estimated length of stay. The proposed procedure is validated using medical data from eighteen hospitals in a Chinese city. This study facilitates the integration of patient-related information with the conventional FM processes and demonstrates the potential improvement in patients’ satisfaction with better hospital logistics and pharmaceutical services.