Environmental strategies for a healthcare system with green technology investment and pandemic effects

Today the healthcare industries struggle to cope with the ecological and social challenges for their customer services even while we are entering into a post-pandemic economy. Hospitals are quickly running out of essential medical supplies and firms are fraught to keep up with the rise in pent-up demand due to ongoing supply chain issues caused by the troubles from the pandemic. Therefore, we must design a sustainable inventory strategy for managing the healthcare supply chain (HSC) to ensure customer service and net-zero economy. This study explores sustainable inventory policies in a pandemic situation while considering the transport cost as proportional to COVID-19 intensity. We assume that the pharmaceuticals items have a predictable shelf-life and demand rate directly relates to the effectiveness of the investment in service facilities. The model incorporates the carbon emissions during the activities of transport, production, and storage, which are intended to be cut by green investment. The proposed scenario is modeled as an optimization problem and a solution approach has been designed for finding the sustainable inventory strategies such as order lot-size, delivery lead time, amount of green and service investment with the objective of reducing CO2 and overall cost. Key managerial insights into the influence of pandemic are extracted through the study of numerical and sensitivity. The suggested model is validated in the healthcare sector. The novelty of this research is examining the effect of green investment and COVID-19 pandemic on HSC. This work also reveals how green technology can play a vital role in managing the HSC issues caused by the pandemic in the post-COVID-19 environment.