Designing an incentive scheme within a cooperative game for consolidated hospital systems

This study investigates the collaboration framework of hospitals for consolidated healthcare systems. Although existing literature advocates the notion of strategic partnership in healthcare systems, there is a dearth of quantitative studies analyzing the co-existence of cooperation and conflicting objectives of members. We concentrate on the coordination of hospitals such that there is a central referral system to facilitate patients’ transfer. Two main players considered are physicians, and the referral system, which acts on behalf of the hospitals’ managers and the leadership team. Interaction within these players will shape the coordinating scheme to improve the overall system performance. To develop the incentive scheme for physicians and aligning hospitals activities, we created a multi-objective mathematical model to obtain the optimal transfer pattern. Recognizing such optimal solutions as a baseline, an incentive scheme based on a cooperative game between physicians and the central referral system is devised to coordinate decisions towards system optimality. Indeed, this approach allows for intervening physicians’ perceived cost function and encourages them to accept requested transfers. The feasibility of the proposed approach is examined via a case study with real world datasets.