Design of Preventive Healthcare Services: A Brief Review

Abstract

The main purpose of preventive healthcare services is to minimize the risk of serious health conditions and increase the probability of early detection and diagnosis of serious illness. Therefore, the effectiveness and efficiency of a preventive healthcare service design play a crucial role in increasing the level of participation in such services. Additionally, the recent Covid-19 outbreak once again showed that implementing an effective preventive healthcare service design can make substantial savings on healthcare expenditures while promoting the welfare of society. Preventive healthcare-related location studies are relatively young compared to other studies considering other healthcare facility location studies. Although academic research on determining preventive healthcare facilities dates back to the early 2000s, there exists a body of literature that can be a review study topic. Hence, in this study, we present a brief review of the literature that considers location and design problems related to preventive healthcare facilities. We also discuss the basic features of the preventive healthcare service design problem and solution approaches proposed.