A stochastic programming model for emergency supplies pre-positioning, transshipment and procurement in a regional healthcare coalition

A regional healthcare coalition enables its member hospitals to conduct an integrated emergency supply management, which is seldom addressed in the existing literature. In this work, we propose a two-stage stochastic emergency supply planning model to facilitate cooperation and coordination in a regional healthcare coalition. Our model integrates pre-disaster emergency supplies pre-positioning and post-disaster emergency supplies transshipment and procurement and considers two planning goals, i.e., minimizing the expected total cost and the maximum supply shortage rate. With some comparison models and a case study on the West China Hospital coalition of Sichuan Province, China, under the background of the COVID-19 epidemic, we demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of our model and obtain various managerial insights and policy suggestions for practice. We highlight the importance of conducting integrated management of emergency supplies pre-positioning, transshipment and procurement in the regional healthcare coalition for better preparation and responding to future potential disasters.