Essays on managing pharmaceutical supply chains: improving drug safety, security, and efficacy

Abstract

The pharmaceutical industry is facing unprecedented challenges in managing drug safety, security, and efficacy. There is growing concern that a one-size-fits-all medical treatment approach may be ineffective (or even harmful) for individual patients; that widely available prescription drugs (e.g., prescription opioids) pose increasing threats to public health; and that firms are gradually shifting away from the blockbuster innovation model to a niche-market-targeted precision medicine approach to improve drug efficacy, but face profitability challenges in these segmented drug markets. Each of the concerns presents daunting challenges for various stakeholders within the pharmaceutical supply chains (e.g., drug developers, retail pharmacies, healthcare providers, patients), and draws increased scrutiny from government agencies, policymakers, and the public. This dissertation is my effort to, first, explore these contemporary challenges and complex problems residing in U.S. pharmaceutical supply chains, second, reveal potential problems which may have been previously hidden within the complicated supply chain structures, and third, propose effective measures to, in part, address these challenges. The results of such efforts are three empirical studies. The first study investigates effective measures to enable personalized care delivery, thereby improving drug safety associated with psychiatric medications. The second study reveals the extent of prescription opioid diversion within pharmaceutical supply chains and investigates the effectiveness of supply chain traceability in containing the security breaches. The third, and final, study investigates the profitability challenges associated with developing niche-market-targeted medications, revealing that such a strategy leads to a market expansion instead of market contraction. This dissertation is carefully designed to examine unique challenges located in three distinct segments of pharmaceutical supply chains (i.e., delivery, distribution, and development segments), and is informed by various streams of literature. It demonstrates, in part, the dynamic nature of pharmaceutical supply chains, and serves, I believe, as the first systematic attempt in the operations management (OM) literature to rigorously, empirically evaluate and address these contemporary challenges within pharmaceutical supply chains.