Patient patience and pandemics: How to keep patient choice up, stress down in a pandemic

Allowing patients to choose which hospital they attend when suffering illness during a pandemic rather than assigning them to a specific healthcare facility could be inefficient, according to research. But incentives might redress the balance. A new proposal is based on two assignment models. The first, a decentralized, equilibrium model, describes the patient choice of hospital. The second, centralized, non-linear programming model allows the health authority to maximize resource utilization of...