A non-cooperative game with incomplete information to improve patient hospital choice

In order to improve the accessibility of health care service, the hierarchical health care delivery system that includes the general hospital (GH) and the community health care center (CHC) has been gradually established in urban China. In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic framework that considers both the influence of static and dynamic factors on patients' choices among health care facilities. We formulate a non-cooperative game with incomplete information and regard the equilibrium of this game as a best prediction of patients' hospital choice results. We implement the proposed game theoretic framework by a case study. We provide quantitative analysis on the equilibrium to study how those factors affect patients' hospital choices. Finally, to achieve the goal that alleviates the congestion of GH and balance the patient flow among GHs and CHCs, we implement two incentive policies in our model, along with analysing their effects on patients' hospital choices. The non-cooperative game with incomplete information model functions as a quantitative tool to help the government decision-maker to improve the patient flow distribution in urban China.