Sustainable healthcare information exchanges network design: a scenario-based planning approach

As information technology becomes widely embedded in all areas of healthcare operations, healthcare providers have found that patient information sharing is imperative to the sustainability of health organisations. This can be achieved using a healthcare information exchange (HIE). When an agent decides to join the health network, a subscription fee is paid to the HIE for access to services. There are many challenges to creating an effective healthcare information exchange network. This involves understanding the sustainability of the HIE network as well as the dynamic behaviour of healthcare information exchanges. The effect of the uncertainty may increase the infeasibility of the solution. Accordingly, the current study aims to examine the sustainability of the HIE network with uncertain demand. The modelling and solution deal with scenarios-based demand uncertainty, operating costs, and revenues. The computational analyses show the satisfactory performance and the effectiveness of the proposed approach for obtaining a high sustainability level.