Applying Meta-heuristics to Solve Patient Referral Problems

• Main Authors: Xuan-Yin Wang, 王宣尹
• Other Authors: Ping-Shun Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/t8f6jw

碩士 === 中原大學 === 工業與系統工程研究所 === 103 === Applying Meta-heuristics to Solve Patient Referral Problems Student: Xuan-Yin Wang Advisor: Dr. Ping-Shun Chen ABSTRACT In recent years, the demands of people for medical service increase significantly. The utilization of medical resources has an impact on the service quality of hospitals. Therefore, how to allocate medical resources becomes an important issue. In general, people believe that large hospitals are capable to provide the better service, and people are willing to go to large hospitals instead of small ones. This phenomenon will lead to not only overcrowd in larger hospitals, but also lower the service quality in larger hospitals. The case hospital has a large gap of the number of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) patients between two districts. To deal with this problem, the case hospital began to transfer its patients from one district to another, but the question is how many patients should be transferred in order to shorten the average patient waiting time. The purpose of this thesis is therefore to determine the appropriate number of referring patients for the case hospital and compare to its current referral mechanism. This research applied system simulation and combined with meta-heuristics to obtain the appropriate number of referring patients. After solving twenty instances, the results showed that the robustness of the bat algorithm which was adopted by this study. Furthermore, the outcomes showed that there was significant improvement on the average patient waiting time of the case hospital. The findings of this research can provide as a reference for other hospitals to develop their referral standard procedures. Keywords: Simulation optimization, patient referral, bat algorithm (BA), meta-heuristics