Impact of the influenza season on a hospital from a pharmaceutical inventory management perspective

The outbreak of an infectious disease may put significant pressure on a healthcare system, especially when there is a surge of patients. In this paper, we develop two simulation models: (1) disease outbreak model and (2) a medication inventory model. These two models are used to identify inventory policies for managing medication during disease outbreaks. Specifically, we use historical influenza data as an input to the inventory simulation model, which incorporates the impact of disease spread, patients’ health conditions, and medication shelf life. We formulate a dynamic program and use a reduced version of this model to provide inputs to our inventory simulation model. We compare three different simulation‐based policies and perform sensitivity analysis on several parameters such as the gross attack rate and inventory holding cost parameters. Our results provide insight regarding the management of perishable medication inventory at hospitals during an outbreak of an infectious disease.