A multi-agent resource allocation framework for patient journey shortening

Abstract

The fast growing and dynamic demands on the existing complex healthcare services make healthcare resource management challenging. The focus of this paper is on cancer patient journey shortening with better allocation of resources. The issue is non-trivial as improving the experience of any patient may however affect that of the others who are sharing the same pool of resources allocated to different medical units. In particular, we study how additional resources, if available, can be strategically allocated to the medical units involved in cancer treatment in a dynamic manner to achieve better patient journey shortening effect. A multi-agent resource allocation approach is adopted and a 3-level bidding mechanism designed based on the organizational structure of the public hospitals in Hong Kong is proposed. The journey shortening is achieved via the design of the bid formulation so that the additional resources can be allocated on-demand to medical units. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its variants on journey shortening, we developed a simulation model based on an anonymized dataset obtained from Hospital Authority in Hong Kong and carried out a series of experiments with promising results obtained.