Despite high healthcare spending in Brazil, quality and operational efficiency are not always achieved. To deal with this issue, hospital managers adopted the pooling of hospital resources as a strategy to reduce costs. The Sterilization Centers (SC) plays a crucial role, receiving and sterilizing materials used in other parts of the hospital. This activity, although essential, is expensive and, therefore, the target of studies to reduce costs. The centralization of sterilization operations in networks is highlighted in the literature as an important strategy for reducing global costs. This research aims to develop a model to support the decision to create a centralized sterilization unit in a network of hospitals in Brazil. The methodology includes a scoping review and action research. The research contributes to a greater understanding of the benefits of SC centralization, modeling operational processes of a network of four SCs with a critical analysis and the results obtained with the development and application of the model to define the centralization scenario of a hospital network. In this way, the benefits of economies of scale, operational efficiency, greater control and tracking of materials, among others, are observed. The proposed model differs from those found in the literature by guaranteeing global optimization when using a single model with real data. It allows real decision making for a healthcare organization, proposing the opening of a single centralized SC to serve the network s hospitals.