Spatial Distribution of Hospital Utilization in a Region

摘要

Effective regional planning and management of service facilities operating in a stochastic environment require a solid understanding of the demand processes of the customers being served. This thesis is concerned with the analysis of descriptive and normative models that involve modeling the individual customer's facility attributes. A multinominal logit model of hospital utilization is developed, estimated and evaluated using data from 131,000 PAS discharge abstracts from 14 general hospitals in Rhode Island. The results indicate that the disaggregate choice model gives a very good fit to the data. The role of physicians in the patient's hospitalization decisions leads to the development of a normative facility utilization model. This model assumes that customers have to interact with agents who direct them to the service facilities.