A simple and practical approach to improving the cost effectiveness of surgical inventory management.

Operating room inventories typically involve hundreds of surgical items. Managers require very high service levels since the cost of shortages can be excessive up to and including cancelling surgery. From our experience, many inventory managers rely on manual approaches and intuition to set inventory control parameters.

A decision tool for negotiating home care funding levels in Ontario.

This paper describes a decision tool created for the Simcoe County Community Care Access Center (SCCCAC) in Ontario. The tool allows the SCCCAC to quantitatively assess the trade-offs between cost, quality, and waiting time of their home care patients. This information can then be used to negotiate reasonable funding levels with the Ontario government and to appropriately allocate this funding among the various patient groups at the SCCCAC.