Seminar: The Impact of Reimbursement Policy on Patient Welfare, Readmission Rate and Waiting Time in a Public Healthcare System: Fee-for-Service vs. Bundled Payment
Date: Apr 28 (Fri), 2017
Time: 11:00am to 12:30pm
Venue: Room 7-207, 6/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building

This paper examines the impact of two reimbursement schemes on patient welfare, readmission rate, and waiting time in a three tiered public healthcare system comprising (a) a public funder who decides on the reimbursement rate to maximize patient welfare, (b) a public healthcare provider (HCP) who decides on the service rate (which affects readmission rate and operating cost), and (c) a pool of (waiting time sensitive) patients who decide whether or not to seek elective treatments. We focus our analysis on (1) a Fee-For-Service (FFS) scheme under which the HCP receives payment each time a patient is admitted (or readmitted); and (2) a Bundled Payment (BP) scheme under which the HCP receives a lump sum payment for the entire episode of care for each patient (regardless of the number of readmissions). By considering an M/M/1 queueing model with endogenous arrivals and readmissions, we analyze a three-stage Stackelberg game to determine the patient's initial admission rate, the HCP's service rate (which affects the readmission rate), and the funder's reimbursement rate. This analysis enables us to compare the equilibrium outcomes (patient welfare, readmission rate and waiting time) associated with the FFS and BP schemes. We find that, when the patient pool is large, the BP scheme dominates in terms of higher patient welfare and lower readmission rate, but the FFS scheme dominates in terms of waiting time. However, when the patient pool is small, the BP scheme dominates the FFS scheme in all three performance measures. Joint work with Chris Tang, Yulan Wang, and Ming Zhao

Event Speaker
Dr Pengfei Guo, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Dr Pengfei Guo
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University   ( Bio )

Dr. Pengfei Guo is currently an associate professor of Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies (LMS), the Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ. He obtained his PHD on business administration from Duke Univ. in 2007. Before that, he got his B.S. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong Univ. and M.S. degree from Shanghai Jiaotong Univ. He joined Hong Kong PolyU in 2007 and published 23 papers within nine years in PolyU, among which, nine of them belong to the UT-Dallas journal publication. He is currently serving as an associate head for research and the DRC chair of LMS of PolyU. His research interests are mainly on studying customer strategic queueing behavior and the design and control of service systems in healthcare, security checking, and sharing economy.