Strategic Queueing Behavior of Two Groups of Patients in a Healthcare System

Abstract

Long waiting times and crowded services are the current medical situation in China. Especially in hierarchic healthcare systems, as high-quality medical resources are mainly concentrated in comprehensive hospitals, patients are too concentrated in these hospitals, which leads to overcrowding. This paper constructs a game-theoretical queueing model to analyze the strategic queueing behavior of patients. In such hospitals, patients are divided into first-visit and referred patients, and the hospitals provide patients with two service phases of “diagnosis” and “treatment”. We first obtain the expected sojourn time. By defining the patience level of patients, the queueing behavior of patients in equilibrium is studied. The results suggest that as long as the patients with low patience levels join the queue, the patients with high patience levels also join the queue. As more patients arrive at the hospitals, the queueing behavior of patients with high patience levels may have a negative effect on that of patients with low patience levels. The numerical results also show that the equilibrium behavior deviates from a socially optimal solution; therefore, to reach maximal social welfare, the social planner should adopt some regulatory policies to control the arrival rates of patients.