A multi agent system approach for hospital's drugs management using combinatorial auctions

The healthcare services cost are constantly increasing during the last 20 years. This trend has two origins: on one hand the people resort to drugs and healthcare services more often than in the past because more medical treatment are known; on the other hand, this evolution was not supported by an intelligent growth and design of healthcare structure and services. Indeed, a lot of hospital processes, such as drugs and equipments purchasing and managing, are not under control of hospital managers. This work faces the cost and management criticalities presenting a healthcare system as a multi-agent cooperative network. The proposed model faces the challenge of (i) gaining the benefits deriving from successful collaborative models already used in industrial systems and (ii) transferring the most appropriate industrial management practices. The model exploits an operations research technique based on combinatorial auctions in order to effective assign drugs to wards.