Location and reorganization problems: The Calabrian health care system case

In the last few years, the Italian healthcare system has been coping with radical changes, aimed at guaranteeing more efficiency while containing costs. Starting from the actual service network organization, we discuss the problem faced by the Italian authorities of reorganizing the healthcare service network and we propose some optimization models to support the decision-making process. In the first part of the work, we compare the existing health care service network of the northern area of Calabria (Italy) with the configurations determined by solving well-known facility location models. In the second part, taking into account the healthcare reorganization plans imposed by local governments, we consider the problem of reorganizing the public health care service network of the northern area of Calabria. Indeed, we propose two ad-hoc optimization models that consider national and regional guidelines and constraints. The behavior of the proposed models, in terms of solution quality, is evaluated on the basis of an extensive computational study on real data.