Lean healthcare: An approach to optimizing pharmaceutical inventory management in a public hospital.

Lean healthcare; inventory management; pharmacy.

The lean healthcare methodology has been applied in healthcare institutions as a effective tool for process management and waste reduction, focusing on the review of processes based on three organizational principles: focus on the patient, time and value. Thus, this research aims to study and propose the implementation of a lean healthcare approach for the optimization of pharmaceutical inventory management at Hospital Universitario Onofre Lopes - HUOL. The research is guided by the value stream mapping tools and a two-drawer kanban system, in order to understand the current processes used for the internal distribution of pharmaceutical supplies and to propose an alternative of optimization suitable to the needs of the unit in study. The relevance of this work is sustained when considering that in health care services, quality should be considered a factor of continuous improvement, mainly due to the high complexity characteristic of inventory management processes in the hospital environment. At the end of this research, it is hoped that it will be possible to propose improvements in the distribution of supplies and management of pharmaceutical inventory, in order to improve the inventory control mainly in the satellite storage units of the hospital under study. In addition, is expected a better understanding of the peculiarities involved in the implementation processes of lean approaches in hospital systems, showing its potential for optimization for complex systems. It is also expected to make it possible to reduce the monetary value in stock as well as to reduce disruptions in the supply of medicines.