Patient referral strategy and cost sharing for a medical consortium

Lijun Gao (), Jun Li () and Yinlian Zeng ()
Additional contact information
Lijun Gao: Southwest Jiaotong University
Jun Li: Southwest Jiaotong University
Yinlian Zeng: Shenzhen Technology University

4OR, 2024, vol. 22, issue 2, No 4, 253-281

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, we investigate the problem of sharing medical resources through patient referrals for hospitals in a medical consortium. We address two main issues. One is to derive the optimal patient referral strategy for the consortium to minimize the total costs of the consortium; the other is to determine a fair cost allocation scheme to ensure the stability of the medical consortium. We first consider a general setting wherein patients can be referred between any two hospitals in the medical consortium. Then, we extend our analysis to the special setting wherein patient referrals are only allowed between hospitals in different categories. We formulate the patient referral problem as a convex optimization problem, and discuss the properties of the optimal patient referral strategy. We apply the framework of cooperative game theory to allocate the total costs arising from the medical consortium to the member hospitals. We propose a dual-price cost allocation scheme and show that it is in the core of the corresponding cooperative game. Numerical studies are conducted to further examine the proposed cost allocation schemes and to investigate the impact of parameters on the efficiency of a medical consortium.

Keywords: Medical consortium; Patient referral; Cooperative game; Cost allocation; Core; 91A12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10288-023-00548-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:aqjoor:v:22:y:2024:i:2:d:10.1007_s10288-023-00548-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... ch/journal/10288/PSE

DOI: 10.1007/s10288-023-00548-2

Access Statistics for this article

4OR is currently edited by Yves Crama, Michel Grabisch and Silvano Martello

More articles in 4OR from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().