Dynamic Demand Management for Health Care Service

To improve the operation performance in the health service organization a dynamic overbooking model (DOM) was proposed to determine how many resources are released to be scheduled. Unlike in other industries, in dealing with optimization problems in health care, social morality and fairness have to be considered. Thus, we used an utility function to judge the performance in terms of the compromise between service quality for patients and revenue for the organization. The objective was to maximize the expected utilities. To verify this model, we established a registration simulation model and analyzed historical data from health management Center (HMC) in NTU Hospital to obtain relative parameters for describing demand environment. DOM was then compared with two alternative policies: the no overbooking and static overbooking policy (SOP). Sensitive analyses show DOM is robust under diversified health care environments.