Abstract
BackgroundGrowing demand for medical services has increased patient waiting time due to the limited number or unbalanced distribution of healthcare centers. Healthcare teleconsultation networks are one of the potentially powerful systems to overcome this problem. Medical pathology can hugely benefit from teleconsultation networks because having second opinions is precious for many cases; however, resource planning (i.e., assignment and distribution of pathology consultation requests) is challenging due to bulky medical images of patients. This results in high setup and operational costs. The aim of this study is to design an optimal teleconsultation network for pathology labs under the supervision of medical sciences universities in Tehran, Iran.MethodsTo avoid the setup cost, we first propose a modified hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay architecture for our telepathology network, using Iran’s National Healthcare Information Network (SHAMS) as the underlying infrastructure. Then we apply optimization techniques to solve the request assignment and distribution problems in the network. Finally, we present a novel mathematical model with the objective of minimizing the variable operational costs of the system.ResultsThe efficiency of the proposed method was evaluated by a set of practical-sized network instances simulated based on the characteristics of SHAMS. The results show that the presented model and architecture can obtain optimal solutions for network instances up to 350 nodes, which covers our target network.ConclusionsWe believe that the proposed method can be beneficial for designing large-scale medical teleconsultation networks by adjusting the constraints according to the rules and conditions of each country. Our findings showed that teleconsultation networks in countries with strong information technology (IT) infrastructures are under the influence of consultation fees, while in countries with weak IT infrastructure, the transmission costs are more critical. To the best of our knowledge, no research has so far addressed resource planning in medical teleconsultation networks using optimization techniques. Besides, the target network, i.e., pathology labs under the supervision of medical sciences universities in Tehran and the SHAMS network, are discussed for the first time in this work.
Highlights
Growing demand for medical services has increased patient waiting time due to the limited number or unbalanced distribution of healthcare centers
Α controls the connectivity of the graphs, β has a direct effect on the number of edges, and ε adjusts the average node degree (Avg Average Node Degree (Deg) in the table)
We studied the medical teleconsultation networks having high potentials to decrease the costs of related medical services and patient waiting times
Summary
Growing demand for medical services has increased patient waiting time due to the limited number or unbalanced distribution of healthcare centers. Due to the increasing demand for these services as well as the limited number of healthcare resources, the average waiting time is increasing [2], causing the anxiety of the patients, delays in their diagnosis, and the possibility of deterioration of their conditions All these lead to higher costs of treatment and less satisfaction of both patients and healthcare providers [3]. A teleconsultation network is an online platform that connects specialists of a field through a secure network to share patient information [5] Developing such platforms can have positive effects on the quality of care and the satisfaction of both patients and healthcare providers. Research findings have confirmed that a teleconsultation system could effectively reduce patient waiting time, decrease the overall cost of the healthcare system, and increase resource utilization [7,8,9]
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