A BI-OBJECTIVE MATHEMATICAL MODEL TO DESIGN A HEALTH SERVICE NETWORK WITH CONSIDERING THE EFFICIENCY OF LOCATIONS

The healthcare system can be hierarchical in nature. There is a linkage between the dierent levels, which makes it hard to solve the location problems for each level of this system separately. This system may consist of primary health centers, regional health centers, and hospitals. A growing body of evidence reveals the importance of primary care to health of societies. Hence, all countries should provide ecient, eective, timely, and fair basic health services. This may consist of primary health centers, regional health centers, and hospitals. The aim of this research is designing a three-level health service network. To touch this purpose, we deem each candidate location as a decision-making unit and, then, calculate the eciency score of this location based on the Non-Radial RAM method. In this paper, a bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model was introduced for a hierarchical three-level health service network design problem. The rst objective function minimizes total transportation time from patient zones to each level. The second objective function seeks to maximize eciency by selecting more ecient locations. We use the augmented e-constraint method (AUGMECON2) to solve the bi-objective mathematical model. To prove the applicability and validity of the proposed decision model, we provided a real case study in the city of Tehran. The results of the suggested model show that there is a con ict between objectives. Besides, the impact of the referral parameter on the ow of patients in the system is clear.