Managing the quality-speed tradeoff in blockchain-supported healthcare diagnostic services

Abstract

Healthcare systems suffer from misdiagnosis and high congestion. Hospitals and diagnostic service centers need to weigh the benefits of running an additional test to improve the diagnostic accuracy (service quality) against the cost of the overall delay to the patients (service speed). Blockchain can improve the average service rate (i.e., accelerating effect) and reduce the misdiagnosis concerns. This paper develops strategic queuing models to investigate the operational impacts of blockchain on the quality-speed tradeoff and price decisions of a diagnostic service center. We first compare the service center's equilibrium decisions between cases in which blockchain is (or is not) implemented. Then, we investigate how the service equilibrium changes by introducing patient heterogeneity that results from a proportion of patients not wishing to use blockchain in practice. We show that, in the absence of patient heterogeneity, blockchain may not necessarily improve the service quality or the service price but certainly decreases system congestion and improves the effective demand. However, in the presence of patient heterogeneity, we find that although blockchain is beneficial to improving the service rate, the diagnostic service system tends to be more congested when the accelerating effect becomes more obvious.