Research On Community Hospital Location Considering Patient’s Healthcare Seeking Behavior

With economy developing and living standards improving rapidly in China, people’s need for medical service is increasing and the contradiction between shortages of medical resource in major hospital and idle medical resource in community hospital becomes more and more obviously. It will do a lot of effects on the efficiency of medical system that how to make a locating decision scientifically. Healthcare seeking behavior is a key point for whether the location is reasonable, but, few researches on locating consider it.After reviewing medical facilities location researches, healthcare seeking behavior is combined into medical facilities location problem based on covering model, hierarchical Location, healthcare seeking behavior theory, using theoretical analysis, mathematical modeling and simulation method. The thesis makes three important contents as follows:First, analyze the relationship between healthcare seeking behavior and medical facilities location. Features of healthcare seeking behavior, relative factors, and shortages of current location theory are summarized. Then, these factors are combined into location model.Second, with the assumption of homogeneous community medical facilities, internal relation between healthcare seeking behavior and community medical facilities is analyzed. How distance, age, education degree and income influence healthcare seeking behavior is the focus, and a utility function is defined to describe it. Based on the utility function, a community medical facility location model considering healthcare seeking behavior is built. A modified Lagrangean relaxation procedure is used to solve this problem. At last, a living case is used to analyze the model and algorithm.Third, the difference between hierarchical medical system and homogeneous community medical facilities healthcare seeking behavior is analyzed, a more complex utility function is defined to describe resident’s healthcare seeking behavior. A hierarchical medical facility location model is built, and a genetic algorithm is used to solve this problem.The result of this thesis provides a novel and effective solution for medical facility location problem. Also, it will do lots of efforts on making reasonable medical facility location and resource allocation decision, and has vital reference value on reducing medical resource stress and improving efficiency of medical system.