Proposal of a conceptual framework to optimise drug management in healthcare systems

Drug expenditure is a relevant factor in profit and loss account of healthcare systems. Hospital management is in charge of optimising drug management in order to reduce inventory costs and maximise the cost-effective use of personnel and resources. This paper presents a conceptual framework to tackle this problem, embodying the starting point for future researches. To this purpose, it describes a representation of physical and information flows related to drugs in a hospital , the variables related to the hospital environment, the management parameters useful to reach the drug system optimisation and the performance indicators to measure efficiency of approaches.