Designing capacity rollout plan for neonatal care service system in Korea

Strengthening the infrastructure of the neonatal care service system is an important field of work in Korea. Motivated by the efforts of the Korean government, we address the problem of allocating care capacities to neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) to maximize the demand covered over the planning horizon. To address this problem, we suggest a mathematical model that incorporates three important problem features: (1) a multi-period planning horizon; (2) a hierarchical structure of the neonatal care service system (multi-flow, nested, and non-coherent); and (3) a congestion effect in providing services at each NICU. The model is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming problem and is applied to the design of neonatal care service system in Korea. By evaluating several scenarios through varying the total amount of budget available, our experimental results highlight insightful information for policy makers to establish their rollout plan. In particular, we evaluate three alternatives to improve the quality of neonatal care services. The first two alternatives are related to increasing care capacities, and the third option is related to limiting inappropriate inflow to NICUs. The experimental results confirm that increasing care capacities by upgrading lower levels of NICUs to higher levels is the most effective policy among the three options. We believe that our model and findings are paramount for the development of better neonatal care service systems.