Hiring Expert Consultants in E-Healthcare: An Analytics-Based Two Sided Matching Approach

Abstract

Very often in some censorious healthcare scenario, there may be a need to have some expert consultancies (especially by doctors) that are not available in-house to the hospitals. Earlier, this interest- ing healthcare scenario of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) from outside of the hospitals had been studied with the robust concepts of mechanism design with money and mechanism design without money. In this paper, we explore the more realistic two sided matching market in our healthcare set-up. In this, the members of the two participating communities, namely the patients and the doctors are revealing the strict preference ordering over the members of the opposite community for a stipulated amount of time. We assume that the patients and doctors are strategic in nature. With the theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that the TOMHECs, that results in the stable allocation of doctors to the patients, satisfies the several economic properties such as strategy-proof- ness (or truthfulness) and optimality. Further, the analytically based analysis of our proposed mechanisms i.e. RAMHECs and TOMHECs are carried out on the ground of the expected distance of the allocation done by the mechanisms from the top most preference. The proposed mechanisms are also validated with the help of exhaustive experiments.