Abstract
Many patients prefer to use the best hospitals even if there are one or more other hospitals closer to their homes; this behavior is called “hospital bypass behavior”. Because this behavior can be problematic in urban areas, it is important that it be reduced. In this paper, the taxi GPS data of Beijing and Suzhou were used to measure hospital bypass behavior. The “bypass behavior index” (BBI) represents the bypass behavior for each hospital. The results indicated that the mean hospital bypass trip distance value ranges from 5.988 km to 9.754 km in Beijing and from 4.168 km to 10.283 km in Suzhou. In general, the bypass shares of both areas show a gradually increasing trend. The following hospitals exhibited significant patient bypass behavior: the 301 Hospital, Beijing Children’s Hospital, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University and the Suzhou Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The hospitals’ reputation, transport accessibility and spatial distribution were found to be the main factors affecting patient bypass behavior. Although the hospital bypass phenomena generally appeared to be more pronounced in Beijing, the bypass trip distances between hospitals were found to be more significant in Suzhou.
Highlights
A widespread and unusual phenomenon exists in Chinese health care has occurred for years where patients prefer high-quality medical resources regardless of whether they have a minor ailment or a serious illness
Hospital bypass behavior has caused many problems such as overcrowding in high quality hospitals with few patients in ordinary hospitals, which leads to the inefficient usage of medical resources, difficulty registering because of long wait times, and traffic jams around quality hospitals [4,5]
Because our focus pertains to the relation between the origin and the destination (OD) of taxi passenger trips, taxi trajectories were simplified into pick-up and drop-off points, i.e., when the “state” changes from 0 to 1, a pick-up event has occurred
Summary
A widespread and unusual phenomenon exists in Chinese health care has occurred for years where patients prefer high-quality medical resources (large hospitals) regardless of whether they have a minor ailment or a serious illness. New hospitals are being built in new urban areas, the superior medical resources still remain in inner city regions [3] These patterns of heterogeneity, which lead to a mismatch between medical service supply and demand, promote hospital bypass behavior. Hospital bypass behavior has been a significant reason for “proper health care is difficult to get” in China; it is necessary to discourage bypass behavior To realize this goal, we quantify bypass behavior trends and attempt to identify its causes in terms of the heterogeneity of medical resources in cities. We quantify bypass behavior trends and attempt to identify its causes in terms of the heterogeneity of medical resources in cities This analysis should provide guidance on the reasonable allocation of medical resources, which can help individuals successfully obtain proper medical care
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