Abstract
The pharmaceutical industry is a driving force for global economies as it significantly impacts patient healthcare, safety, research, and employment generation. Thanks to recent technological developments, businesses can now easily share information across all their operations and access it quickly. Technology impacts the supply chain because it offers reliable, timely, and accurate information to boost the chain's efficiency. In order to improve service delivery to public hospitals, this study sought to identify important players in South Africa's pharmaceutical sector and the effect of IT on the industry's supply chain.
An exploratory case study research design was used. The exploratory analysis made it possible to provide thorough explanations for the data obtained from the study. A quantitative research approach was used, with primary data being gathered through questionnaires and secondary data being gathered through records and documents provided by healthcare facilities. The sample was chosen from public clinics and hospitals in the West Rand of the Johannesburg region of Gauteng Province, South Africa. The study used facilities A, B, and C to randomly divide 114 pharmacists into three groups.
The study has focused on the potential for implementing IT-based frameworks in the public health sector and proposed a framework intended for Gauteng public hospitals and clinics. The framework provides an underlying model to support research efforts through the SmartPLS 3 software to test the conceptual model. The study employed a 5000-resample bootstrapping technique to determine the constructs' significance of the paths and weights.
The research findings indicated the descriptive statistics on the measures of technology adaption to the supply chain management (SCM). The mean value for all the dimensions and the constructs exceeded a value of 4.00 on the five-point Likert scale, which indicated that the measurements are accurate measures of each construct. The results from correlation analysis indicated that technology adaption and SCM had a moderately positive effect on the independent variables (technical knowledge, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and IT infrastructure).
The study concludes that public health facilities and the medical supply depot must collaborate to develop a clear line of sight of the movement of goods across state-owned facilities and support one another through low stock levels.