A Computational Geometry Based Facility Location Model for Healthcare Management System

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTIONThe usage of Computer for the sake of mankind is the main objective of computer science and applications since its inception. The applications of computer ranges from scientific computation to data science, from rocket science to bioinformatics. There is another area where the computers have been used for the past few decades. This is Geographical Information Systems or GIS. GIS is an interdisciplinary branch of study where Geography and Information technology merges for giving better services to the mankind. The present work is the proposal of a GIS system for healthcare management systems. The proposed model is a generic model which suggests the best possible locations for setting up the different medical facilities to minimize the allocation cost as well as to maximize the utilization. In that sense it is an optimization model also. The proposal of the model comes from an economical model, namely called Pull-Push model. The pool-push model works as follows. In a society, where there are peoples with average and less than average literacy, the people do not know which one is good for their health. For example, consider the usage of mosquito net, or spraying of DDT around their house. Poor people generally do not spent money for these. This is because that the effect of mosquito net and DDTspraying is not directly visible to them. The disease like Dengue spreads through mosquito but not that every single mosquito bite spreads it and in a village of thousand people with almost the same setup, a few gets attacked by Dengue. Rest all somehow bypasses it. So, rural people do not care much for it. The observation is, rural people do not spend much money for prevention purposes [1]. On the other hand, whenever a disease occurs, people becomes active and in such cases they travel a long distance to a good hospital for better services. Sometimes they even move to private healthcare service sectors and spend a lot of money. The curtail observation is that the rural poor people spends more money in cure and recovery process because that has a clear and visible outcome.The role of government always remain crucial in such situations. They uses a model called push and pull model. Whenever there is a policy of prevention, the governments generally supply it forcefully. Either free of cost or in a subsidized form. i.e. they send their workers todifferent villages or different slums and distributes them to the people. This is called push model. For curing process, government uses a pull model. Government sets up different healthcare centres of different levels and people goes there for availing the facilities. This is because it is uneconomical for governments to set up hospitals at every locality. So, government carefully selects some locations and sets up facility centres. In this way government gives the facilities by push/pull model. A good discussion of such model can be found in the work of Banerjee and Duflo [1].In our present work, we have suggested a three tier model of facility location in the context ...