Location Planning Problem of Service Centers for Sustainable Home Healthcare: Evidence from the Empirical Analysis of Shanghai

Sustainability

Gang Du¹  Chuanwang Sun²  Yongrok Choi³  Malin Song³ 

[1] Department of Business Management, School of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China;;Collaborative Innovation Center for Energy Economics and Energy Policy, China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy, School of Economics, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China;Department of Business Management, School of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China

关键词: location planning problem;    home healthcare;    mixed integer programming;    sustainability;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su71215787

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

It is of theoretical and practical significance to understand what factors influence the sustainable development of home healthcare services in China. Based on a face-to-face survey, we find that the location planning, which is decisive for the improvement of patient satisfaction, can effectively reduce the risks, as well as the costs of redundant construction and re-construction of service centers for home healthcare and, thus, helps ensure the sustainability of health and the environment. The purposes of this paper are to investigate the existing problem of home healthcare in Shanghai and to find the optimum location planning scheme under several realistic constraints. By considering differentiated services provided by the medical staff at different levels and the degrees of patient satisfaction, a mixed integer programming model is built to minimize the total medical cost. The IBM ILOGCPLEX is used to solve the above model. Finally, a case study of Putuo district in Shanghai is conducted to validate the proposed model and methodology. Results indicate that the model used in this paper can effectively reduce the total medical cost and enhance the medical sustainability, and therefore, the results of the model can be used as a reference for decision makers on the location planning problem of home healthcare services in China.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.