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Abstrait

Selecting Environments for Distribution of Services

Satpal Singh Wadhwa, Kambiz Farahmand, Mahmoud Mostafa and Khiabani VH

Abstract

Aim:

The aim of this study is to provide a mechanism for decision-makers in health services to compare the possible solutions for distribution of specialty services in a given area and to further compare the specialty services for dominant solutions.

Background: There is an increasing recognition that modelling tools can assist in the process of health care decision making. It is imperative that the managers should have some tools at their disposal for efficiently determining what needs to be done in order to reach the best decision they could reach with the information and knowledge that they have.

Methods: In this paper, we propose a questionnaire for expanding healthcare specialty services in a given geographic area. Excel serves as a user interface as well as a powerful computing program. This tool evaluates one or more specialty service to be distributed using three proposed solutions/methods for expanding the specialty service.

Results and discussion: The proposed decision-making tool will be an easy assessment tool that could be used by VA (Veteran Affairs) managers and decision makers to decide if the specialty service(s) is an ideal candidate for distribution. The decision-making tool will be in the form of a questionnaire and the answers to questions will be scored and if the overall score is above the threshold, then the specialty service will be considered a good candidate for expansion or distribution. In summary, we believe the tool adds value to the scarce existing literature on decision-making tools for service distribution in healthcare.