Contract Mechanism In Two-Way Healthcare Referral With Patient Choice

Chinese medical service system is composed of hospitals with different levels of service quality and patients with different preferences,but due to the asymmetric infor-mation between patients and hospitals caused the patients gathering in the high level hospitals,idle resources in the community hospitals.In order to rationally allocate and utilize medical resources,this thesis mainly considers the two-way referral system with patient choice.In this thesis,the optimal service level and referral policy are determined by the patients arrival rate,and the contract mechanism is also studied in different pa-tients' preferences.The results indicate when consider the patients' preferences on service quality and service price,the optimal referral policy changes with the patient's preference.Com-pared with the one-way referral system,two-way referral can help the primary hospitals share the customer flow,transfer some patients to the higher level hospitals to avoid the resource idling in the high-level hospitals;Compared with the non-patient choice of two-way referral system,in the choice system,the high-level hospital shared a large part of the primary diagnosis work,and the optimal referral policy is also changed.Besides,two-way referral system can alleviate the high waiting cost and service cost in one-way system.In contract mechanism,when some parameters are set,high-level medical ser-vice system are willing to offer incentives to help low level system to undertake part of cost,the two healthcare systems can achieve optimal respectively,the optimal referral decision are also the same with centralized situation.