Browsing by Subject "Drug shortages"

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    Balancing Novelty, Safety, and Availability: The Trifecta of Outcomes in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains
    (2024-05) Tyagi, Hanu
    Global pharmaceutical supply chains have garnered unprecedented attention, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their importance, pharmaceutical supply chains are plagued by numerous challenges such as stagnating innovation, increasing drug shortages, and drugs with compromised quality reaching patients. While efforts to resolve these issues hold potential, their implementation often inadvertently leads to unintended consequences. Such tradeoffs, i.e., solutions to one problem unintentionally creating another problem, present a challenge for pharmaceutical supply chains. Despite the central role of tradeoffs in Operations Management research, their understanding within the pharmaceutical supply chain context remains limited. This dissertation serves as an exploration of the tradeoffs within pharmaceutical supply chains. Titled “Balancing Novelty, Safety, and Availability: The Trifecta of Outcomes in Pharmaceutical Supply Chains,” it delves into fundamental questions, such as What is the nature and the extent of these tradeoffs? and, How can supply chain stakeholders mitigate their impact? By concentrating on three pivotal outcomes – novelty, safety, and availability – I examine how efforts meant to improve one of the three outcomes could unintendedly impact other outcomes. Chapter 1 serves as a motivation for the topic and provides a brief overview of the ensuing dissertation essays. In Chapter 2, I show how enhanced transparency in clinical trials, intended to enhance patient safety, may hinder drug novelty. In Chapter 3, I examine the adverse effects of the expedited approval process, aimed at improving the availability of novel drugs, on drug safety. In Chapter 4, I delve into the impact of quality failures on drug availability, discerning when failures help or hurt availability. Chapter 5 concludes with insights the dissertation entails for Operations Management scholars, managers, and policymakers. These dissertation essays aim to evaluate the inherent tradeoffs within the pharmaceutical industry and propose interventions for mutually enhancing operational outcomes. While the overarching goal is to improve outcomes within the pharmaceutical supply chain, the insights from this work also inform a wider array of Operations Management questions beyond the confines of the pharmaceutical industry.