Hospital Logistics Digitalization and Automation: Usage and Outcomes - A Review Study

Hospitals are carrying on their logistics digitalization and automation to face new challenges like the rise in disasters and pandemics and improve their services. However, no research shows managers the state of the art and practice of different technologies usage and outcomes to help them make decisions. This paper discusses and critically analyses the technics, policies, and approaches used with different technologies for hospital inventory and replenishment digitalization and automation. It presents these technologies usage outcomes to provide a summary of the state of the art and practice for this topic. Results show how much these outcomes contribute to the hospital sector requirements, related to the studied process, according to the reviewed works percentages. The results also show that the implemented technologies are not fully leveraged. Less than 30% of the reviewed works present significant outcomes. This work provides practitioners with interesting insights into how to fully leverage the implemented technologies.