Comparison of Subsidy Schemes for Reducing Waiting Times in Healthcare Systems

Qian, Qu; Guo, Pengfei; Lindsey, Robin

doi:10.1111/poms.12738

Cited by 61 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Thus, we should consider a positive toll for the CSP in a TTS to improve operational efficiency for the cases with 0 ≤ τ < 1. Similarly, we should consider a negative toll (i.e a subsidy) for the CPS for cases with τ > 1 (i.e., the FSP is preferred to the CSP) which is the case treated in Qian et al (2017).…”

Section: Queueing Models Based On Customer Choice Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing a Sustainable Two‐Tier Service System with Customer's Asymmetric Preference for Servers

Zhang

Yin

2021

Production and Operations Management

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T his study considers a public service system consisting of two service providers with different service capacities and qualities, such as healthcare or transportation systems. Such a system is called a two-tier service system (TTS). The service provider with higher service capacity and quality charges a higher price and is called a "charge service provider," denoted by CSP, while the other service provider charges a lower price and is called a "free service provider," denoted by FSP. We study the TTS where customers prefer the CSP to the FSP in spite of the higher price of CSP. The strong preference of CSP to FSP, which can be due to bounded rationality, leads to imbalanced workload for the TTS which implies an inefficient use of limited resources. Although both can offer a common set of services, the CSP is overly demanded and highly congested, while the FSP is under-utilized. We first study analytically an extreme case where the preference for CSP is so strong that customers choosing the CSP are delay insensitive and those choosing the FSP are delay sensitive. Then, we extend our analysis to more general cases where customers are delay sensitive in both channels and have asymmetric preferences for service providers. Using a stylized queueing model and equilibrium customer choice analysis, we show that under certain conditions, the two-tier system may reduce congestion and the total social cost in the system. This study offers social planners the guidance in designing less congested, more cost-efficient, and sustainable public service systems.

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Section: Queueing Models Based On Customer Choice Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing a Sustainable Two‐Tier Service System with Customer's Asymmetric Preference for Servers

Zhang

Yin

2021

Production and Operations Management

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“…One effective way to reduce the waiting line is to subsidize elective patients and refer them to private hospitals for treatment. Even without pandemic, the subsidy mechanism has been widely adopted to relieve the pressure of the public hospitals by many countries and areas such as England, Australia and Hong Kong; see Qian, Guo, and Lindsey (2017) , Guo, Tang, Wang, and Zhao (2019) . There are multiple merits by conducting this mechanism during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, between late February and April 15, 2020, the Hong Kong government subsidized part of non-COVID-19 patients, e.g., 66 babies, 5 cancer patients, and 15 pregnant women, and referred them to private hospitals for treatment ( Cheung, 2020 ). However, subsidy scheme is not perfect because the government budget is limited and governments have to adopt some requirements on patients so that the subsidy is appropriately applied; see Qian, Guo, and Lindsey (2017) for the discussions of pros and cons of different types of subsidy schemes. We do not consider the detailed format of subsidy scheme here but instead we consider a general cost function associated with the number of subsidized patients.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cope with the COVID-19 pandemic: Dynamic bed allocation and patient subsidization in a public healthcare system

Zhao

Guo

2022

International Journal of Production Economics

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In many countries and territories, public hospitals play a major role in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. For public hospital managers, on the one hand, they must best utilize their hospital beds to serve the COVID-19 patients immediately. On the other hand, they need to consider the need of bed resources from non-COVID-19 patients, including emergency and elective patients. In this work, we consider two control mechanisms for public hospital managers to maximize the overall utility of patients. One is the dynamic allocation of bed resources according to the evolution process of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other is the usage of a subsidy scheme to move elective patients from the public to private hospitals. We develop a dynamic programming model to study the allocation of isolation and ordinary beds and the effect of the subsidy policy in serving three types of patients, COVID-19, emergency, and elective-care. We first show that the dynamic allocation between isolation and ordinary beds can provide a better utilization of bed resources, by cutting down at least 33.5% of the total cost compared with the static policy (i.e., keeping a fixed number of isolation beds) when facing a medium pandemic alert. Our results further show that subsidizing elective patients and referring them to private hospitals is an efficient way to ease the overcrowded situation in public hospitals. Our results demonstrate that, by dynamically conducting bed allocation and subsidy scheme in different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, patient overall utility can be greatly improved.

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“…Compared with offline healthcare organizations (Osadchiy and Kc 2017, Qian et al. 2017), e‐healthcare platforms help patients and providers effectively overcome time and space constraints (Cline and Haynes 2001), which potentially improve patient experience and bridge the disparity in medical resources across geographical areas (Goh et al. 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Online–Offline Service Integration on e‐Healthcare Providers: A Quasi‐Natural Experiment

Huang

Yan

Yin

2021

Production and Operations Management

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E‐healthcare platforms start to integrate medical services across online and offline channels, where providers can perform online consultations, schedule patients’ offline visits, synchronize relevant medical records, and finally, answer online inquiries regarding follow‐up and recovery anytime and anywhere within one operations management function (i.e., online–offline service integration). In this study, we seek to quantify the effects of online–offline service integration on the e‐healthcare providers’ demand and reputational outcomes, noting that it is not altogether clear how the service integration function will affect the providers who adopt such a function in e‐healthcare platforms. Leveraging a quasi‐natural experiment on an e‐healthcare platform, we conducted difference‐in‐differences analyses in tandem with a variety of matching strategies, including propensity score matching and look‐ahead propensity score matching. Furthermore, we explored the moderating roles of provider‐specific characteristics. Our results reveal a set of robust and interesting findings: (i) e‐healthcare providers, on average, experience increases in online demand and decreases in offline demand post online–offline service integration; (ii) the service integration function also improves the professional reputation of participating providers; (iii) the impact of channel integration on the outcomes is weaker for providers with lower (vs. higher) professional titles; and (iv) the providers who specialize in treating chronic (vs. acute) diseases experience greater increases in online demand and reputational outcomes, yet insignificant changes in offline demand. This work contributes to related prior literatures on healthcare operations management, e‐healthcare, and online–offline channel integration, offering design implications for the service operations of e‐healthcare platforms.

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Comparison of Subsidy Schemes for Reducing Waiting Times in Healthcare Systems

Cited by 61 publications

References 32 publications

Designing a Sustainable Two‐Tier Service System with Customer's Asymmetric Preference for Servers

Designing a Sustainable Two‐Tier Service System with Customer's Asymmetric Preference for Servers

Cope with the COVID-19 pandemic: Dynamic bed allocation and patient subsidization in a public healthcare system

Effects of Online–Offline Service Integration on e‐Healthcare Providers: A Quasi‐Natural Experiment

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