Location Planning Problem of Service Centers for Sustainable Home Healthcare: Evidence from the Empirical Analysis of Shanghai

Abstract

It is of theoretical and practical significance to understand what factors influence the sustainable development of home healthcare services in China. Based on a face-to-face survey, we find that the location planning, which is decisive for the improvement of patient satisfaction, can effectively reduce the risks, as well as the costs of redundant construction and re-construction of service centers for home healthcare and, thus, helps ensure the sustainability of health and the environment. The purposes of this paper are to investigate the existing problem of home healthcare in Shanghai and to find the optimum location planning scheme under several realistic constraints. By considering differentiated services provided by the medical staff at different levels and the degrees of patient satisfaction, a mixed integer programming model is built to minimize the total medical cost. The IBM ILOGCPLEX is used to solve the above model. Finally, a case study of Putuo district in Shanghai is conducted to validate the proposed model and methodology. Results indicate that the model used in this paper can effectively reduce the total medical cost and enhance the medical sustainability, and therefore, the results of the model can be used as a reference for decision makers on the location planning problem of home healthcare services in China.

Disease Diagnosis in Smart Healthcare: Innovation, Technologies and Applications

“…This can certainly help solving some of the aforementioned challenges in healthcare. In addition, it will facilitate sustainable development [5][6][7]. Healthcare sustainability aims at simultaneously optimizing the financial and social impacts of the health service, without compromising the health of our patients and our ability to provide healthcare in the future.…”

Scheduling Optimization of Home Health Care Service Considering Patients’ Priorities and Time Windows

“…Patient satisfaction is an important and commonly-used indicator for measuring the quality in health care. Although patient satisfaction is multi-dimensional [82][83][84], four indexes are usually used to measure the patient satisfaction in home health care [85]: response time, patient wait time, service quality and service price. In general, response time is affected by factors, such as the level of convenience in contact and the number of medical staff.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on the Sustainable Asia Conference 2015

“…In order to cope with these medical issues, home healthcare services could provide more efficient, flexible, and convenient solutions, which can effectively alleviate the problem of a shortage of medical resources. Especially, it can reduce medical costs and improve service quality at the same time [15]. Home healthcare is defined as home-visiting medical services provided by general practitioner service teams based on online and/or phone reservation systems.…”

“…Especially, the inappropriate location of service centers for home healthcare, which is a decisive factor influencing whether medical staff are able to provide timely and convenient services for patients, is the major determinant of patient satisfaction. To examine this location governance issue, Du and Sun (2015) [15] analyzed home healthcare in Shanghai under several realistic constraints to reduce medical costs and improve medical efficiency. The researchers used the following evaluation indexes: minimum total cost of building health centers, minimum investment cost for business startup, minimum labor cost, and the minimum transportation cost.…”

“…The researchers used the following evaluation indexes: minimum total cost of building health centers, minimum investment cost for business startup, minimum labor cost, and the minimum transportation cost. They concluded that the appropriate location of the service centers for home healthcare could decrease investment costs, avoid redundant construction, and improve the degree of patient satisfaction, contributing to the sustainable development of home healthcare [15].…”