Studying the efficiency of inpatient and outpatient pharmacies using lean manufacturing

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to measure the service quality provided by a public health-care service provider using the lean manufacturing concept. The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as a measure for efficiency. The relative efficiency measure concept is introduced. Design/methodology/approach - The inpatient and outpatient pharmacies providing medicines to the public at a large regional hospital in the southern part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were the focus of this study. The lean manufacturing concept is used as a method to improve the service quality and reduce the time needed to deliver the medicine by comparing the efficiency between these two pharmacies based on a metric used in lean manufacturing called takt time. A team was formed to study the current situation, and recommendations based on lean manufacturing were suggested for implementations. Findings - The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as an efficiency measure to compare between different departments working under the same managerial system. Originality/value - The results presented in this paper are reliable, objective and may be generalized for measuring the relative performance efficiency between several departments providing the same type of services.