Dynamic Physician-patient Matching in the Healthcare System
Open Access
- Author:
- Chen, Mutong
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 30, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Hui Yang, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Karen Ann Fisher-Vanden, Committee Member
Robert Carl Voigt, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- waiting time
matching theory
dynamic
demand-supply ratio - Abstract:
- Long patient waiting time has attracted public attention significantly due to the negative effects on patients’ satisfaction with health systems. Due to the ineffective allocation between physicians and patients, the growing population needing healthcare, and the restriction introduced by insurance policies, the waiting time of a patient to see a physician for the first time has been increased by 30% since 2014. There is an urgent need to develop matching mechanisms with the consideration of preferences from both patients and physicians for improving matching results. This thesis presents a new allocation framework between physicians and patients to shorten the patient waiting time as well as improve the allocation effectiveness. We leverage the matching theory and extend the conventional deferred acceptance algorithm to two discrete-time stable marriage frameworks (i.e., discrete deferred acceptance algorithm, DDA and a further improved algorithm, DDA-with-Feedback) with the consideration of uncertainty constraints introduced by insurance types. We benchmark our proposed algorithms with the current practice (i.e., continuous deferred acceptance scheme, CDA) under different scenarios when the demand-supply ratio (DSR) varies. Experimental results show that when the DSR is more than 1.25, DDA and DDA-with-Feedback outperforms traditional CDA practices in terms of waiting time and matching regret. The proposed framework shows strong potential to tackle the problem of long waiting time in the healthcare system.