Decision support system for medical staffs and supplies distribution planning

Abstract

To report the development of decision support system for medical staffs and supplies distribution planning for mobile medical service. The studied organization has provided medical services for many years for people who have limited access to governmental healthcare services at local hospitals. The aim of this research is to develop the decision models of the decision support system that enables planners to effectively and efficiently plan the distribution of medical staffs and supplies to operation sites within the appropriate transportation cost. The developed decision support system can be classified into round-trip distribution planning and one-day trip distribution planning according to the nature of medical resource distribution. There are two main decision models developed for the decision support system. The decision model of round-trip distribution planning applies vehicle routing problem (VRP) to find of operation routes within acceptable cost. Assignment problem model (AP) is applied to help in assigning auxiliary hospitals to support medical staffs to operation site in one-day trip planning. Both decision models apply distance as the decision making criteria to reflect cost of transportation occurred during delivering. The system testing shows that the proposed methodology can reduce the total distance of operation route in round-trip distribution by 10.86%. From user satisfactory evaluation test, the result shows that the decision support system have high possibility to be implemented in planning process of the future.