Background: A two-hospital patient referral problem intends to calculate an optimal value of referral patients between two hospitals and to evaluate whether or not the current number of referral patients is too low.
Objective: The goal of this study is to develop a simulation-based optimization algorithm to find the optimal referral between two hospitals with the unfixed daily patient referral policy.
Methods: This study applied system simulation and a bat algorithm (BA) to build a simulation model in accordance with the status of the two hospitals case and to calculate an optimal value of daily referral patients.
Results: Based on the 20 test instances, we verified the stability of this algorithm. The results show that the average magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) patient wait time reduced from 16 days to eight days. The hospital should increase the average total monthly MRI referral patients to 370 under the limitation of the daily referral patients to 25.
Conclusions: This research investigated the two-hospital patient referral problems. We conducted and analyzed a simulation model and improved the case hospital's conditions, enhancing the quality of its medical care. The findings of this study can extend to other departments or hospitals.
Keywords: Patient referral problem; bat algorithm; simulation optimization.