Abstract
This paper describes a case study for a medical diagnostic laboratory service provider to model the behavior of patients when choosing a patient service centre for their medical tests and to estimate future demand volume. A tool developed based on our methodology allows the management of the diagnostic services to experiment with locations and capacities for locating or relocating service centres. In addition to the focal firm, the methodology considers the impact of decisions on another service provider and hospital laboratories located in the same area. The methodology identifies the most significant service centre attractiveness factors. Our models are validated from different perspectives and show good predictive capability. This case study is used to draw a number of lessons for applying these types of models to other similar services in order to assist other applications.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 198-205 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | European Journal of Operational Research |
| Volume | 251 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 30 Oct 2015 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 16 May 2016 |
Funding
The authors are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments that helped improve this paper. For this research, the second author was partially supported by the Theme-based Research Scheme of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Project No. T32-102/14N).
Keywords
- Demand prediction
- Laboratory services
- Location
- OR in health services
- Patient choice