Integrated Patient Care Optimization Model: A Novel Model to Enhancing Medical Alliance Efficiency

The traditional hierarchical medical system often ignores the linkage among primary medical institutions, and there are still problems such as low patient satisfaction and high hospital operating costs to solve. Therefore, in this study, a new medical alliance model, named the Integrated Patient Care Optimization Model (abbreviated as IPCOM) is proposed, in which a new “parallel referral” mechanism is designed and combined with a “two-way referral” mechanism to enhance the linkage among primary medical institutions and their information communications between large hospitals. Additionally, two objectives (i.e. minimization of the patient costs and hospital costs) are considered in the model, simultaneously. As those two objectives conflict with each other, a well-known evolutionary algorithm named NSGA-II (nondominated sorting genetic algorithm) is employed to obtain the Pareto optimal solutions. Furthermore, to verify the validity of the IPCOM, a simulation model is constructed and compared with the real data provided by a medical alliance in Shenzhen. Numerical experiment results demonstrate that the IPCOM performs better than the traditional model in cost saving, and the simulation results fit well with the real data.