Efficiency evaluation for allocating community-based health services

• We model the health resource allocation problem as a two-objective model.
• The non-inferior solutions of the model are generated using the NISE method.
• The efficiency of the non-inferior solutions is evaluated based on the ICER.
• We examine the impacts of practical problem settings on the non-inferior solutions.

When allocating community-based health services for a geographically defined region, health planners are often faced with the serious conflict for improved health service and a limited budget. This paper extends the cost-based P-median location–allocation model (Daskin & Dean, 2005) to include a public service element and uses the non-inferior set estimation (NISE) method for evaluation of cost/service trade-offs. Service is measured by the percentage of demand volume that can be served within exogenously specified coverage distances. Importantly, we evaluate the efficiency (i.e. the relative cost and service) of the non-inferior solutions of our model using the commonly used “population-based” allocation policy as standard. Computational results illustrate the value of our model under several practical problem settings.