Abstract

Motivated by unbalanced healthcare demand between the General Hospitals (GH) and the Community Healthcare Centers (CHC) in a hierarchical healthcare system, in this paper we study an allocation problem of specialist healthcare resources in the GH between two classes patients, so as to better utilize the resource and maximize the total social welfare of the entire system. By adopting a finite-horizon dynamic programming approach, we derive the optimal Booking Limits Policy to form the resource allocation strategy between early lower priority patients and future higher priority patients. Through numerical analysis and case study, we show the booking limits policy outperforms other two widely used allocation policies, especially when the system is under high demand situation.

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