A Stochastic Location-Allocation Model for Specialized Services in a Multihospital System

Abstract

Rising costs, increasing demand, wasteful spending, and limited resources in the healthcare industry lead to an increasing pressure on hospital administrators to become as efficient as possible in all aspects of their operations including location-allocation. Some promising strategies for tackling these challenges are joining some hospitals to form multihospital systems (MHSs), specialization, and using the benefits of pooling resources. We develop a stochastic optimization model to determine the number, capacity, and location of hospitals in a MHS offering specialized services while they leverage benefits of pooling resources. The model minimizes the total cost borne by the MHS and its patients and incorporates patient service level, patient retention rates, and type of demand. Some computational analyses are carried out to gauge the benefits of optimally sharing resources for delivering specialized services across a subset of hospitals in the MHS against complete decentralization (CD) and full centralization (FC) policies.