Restructuring Primary Health Care Network to Maximize Utilization and Reduce Patient Out-of-Pocket Expenses

Abstract

Providing free primary care to everyone is an important goal pursued by many countries under universal health care programs. Countries like India need to efficiently utilize their limited capacities towards this purpose. Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons, patients incur substantial travel and out-of-pocket expenses for getting primary care from publicly-funded facilities. We propose a set-covering optimization model to assist health policy-makers in managing existing capacity in a better way. Decision-making should consider upgrading centers with better potential to reduce patient expenses and reallocating capacities from less preferred facilities. A multinomial logit choice model is used to predict the preferences. In this article, a brief background and literature survey along with the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) optimization model are presented. The working of the model is illustrated with the help of numerical experiments.