Artificial intelligence’s impact on drug delivery in healthcare supply chain management: data, techniques, analysis, and managerial implications

Healthcare supply chain management’s (HSCM) significance to economic and societal development is huge. In today’s very competitive market, supply chains have seen significant changes in the last several years. There is a need for technology that can handle the increasing complexity of today’s dynamic supply chain activities. Both machine learning (ML) and the quick dissemination of information have the potential to revolutionize the supply chain. ML has spawned a slew of useful supply chain applications in recent years, HSCM has received comparatively less attention. In this study, we applied three ML algorithms such as gradient boosting (GB), histogram gradient boosting (HGB), and cat boosting (CB) with data preprocessing tools to predict whether the medicines are delivered on time or not in the HSCM. The data preprocessing tools are used to manage datasets and increase the performance of ML algorithms. There are three methods of feature selection that are applied in this study such as Pearson correlation, chi-square test, and principal component analysis to select the best features to push in the ML algorithms. The main results show the CB is the best algorithm with the highest accuracy, precision, recall, and f1 score with values respectively. The three ML algorithms are compared with other ML algorithms to show the robustness of the applied ML algorithms. We made a sensitivity analysis to show the chaining in learning rate (LR) and compute the accuracy of the ML algorithms. We show the CB is not sensitive to values between 0.1 and 1.