An integrated approach to multi-criteria-based health care facility location planning

Abstract

Optimal location of health care facilities is critical to the success of health care services. Given its importance, this is an active research topic in health informatics, operational research and GIS. This paper presents an integrated approach to health care facility planning whereby the methods from three research topics are combined. The integrated approach is applied in order to solve preventive health care facility location planning problems. In this approach, a new health accessibility estimation method is developed in order to capture the current characteristics of preventive health care services. Based on this, the preventive health care facility location planning problem is formalized as a multi-criteria facility location model. A new algorithm is proposed in order to solve the model. Experiments on synthetic datasets and on the Alberta breast cancer screening program data are conducted and the results support our analysis. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.