The Role of Information Technology and Information Sharing in Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Performance: Private hospitals' perspective

Successful Supply chain management (SCM) operations in the health care sector are associated with many outcomes and benefits such as: Improved quality of services in the health sector, financial benefits, Improved availability of medicines, meet customer demand and enhance customer satisfaction, improve the overall organizational performance, and attain a sustainable competitive advantage. This research attempted to discuss the SCM of pharmaceutical product in hospital pharmacies in the context of the Kingdom of Bahrain, as it is critical for all hospitals to offer medicines at right time with high quality, and efficient cost to meet the patient's demand and attain competitive advantage. This research focuses on the information technology and information sharing practices and their impact on pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) performance in hospital pharmacies. To measure the above stated correlation, a survey- questionnaire was designed and a Likert scale with five points was applied. The proposed hypotheses were tested using Multiple Linear Regression. The analysis of reported statistics is based on a sample of 171 respondents operating in PSC at private hospital in Bahrain. The study found that Information Technology was positively associated with the PSC performance of hospital pharmacies in Bahrain. On the other hand, this research shows that Information sharing has no significant positive correlation with the PSC performance in hospital pharmacies in Bahrain. Limited research is available in the area of PSC performance in hospital pharmacies. This paper contributes to the knowledge of how PSC performance in healthcare industry is realized as the result of adopting and developing information technology capacities.