The Coordinated Decisions of Service Supply Chain Between Tumor Healthcare Alliance and Patients Under Government Intervention

Abstract

Malignant tumor is a major disease that seriously threatens the health of residents, as one of the vital measures to promote treatment of the tumor, healthcare alliance is widely advocated and adopted. However, conflicting interests between the involved stakeholders in alliance hinder the implementation of healthcare alliance effectively. Based on government intervention, this paper investigated the supply chain of healthcare alliance-patient services at two levels: the tumor healthcare alliance and tumor patients, comprehensive hospitals (CH) and member hospitals (MH) that are low utilized (e.g. Primary Hospitals) within the alliance and respectively constructed the evolutionary game model between the alliance and patients, and between CH and MH to analyze the main influencing factors of the evolutionary strategies and study the optimal coordination mechanisms of the healthcare alliances to achieve the balance of the supply chain of alliance-patient services. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to further verify the validity and rationality of the model. The results show that: “widen different reimbursement policy”, “increasing government subsidies”, “enhancing the reputational impact of the different strategies of the healthcare alliance” and “reducing the CH’s costs of supporting MH” are effective measures to encourage patients to follow first diagnosis at MH and the CH support the MH to strengthen the ability. In addition, “increasing government subsidies” and “reducing the costs of cooperation” can promote both sides to collaborate with each other. Moreover, the initial strategy probability of stakeholders would affect the evolutionary trajectories. The conclusions provide managerial insights of much practical value for the operation of tumor healthcare alliance.