Effectiveness of referral incentive policy: Exploring using queuing network model with blocking

Referral incentive policy plays a key role in "Two-Level Healthcare Delivery System" established in urban China by means of guiding more patients to choose Community Health Centers (CHC) as the first treatment. However, two important questions about this referral incentive policy have not been investigated yet, including "Dose the referral incentive policy really work in the sense of guiding more patients to CHC?" and "Dose the blocking phenomenon in General Hospital (GH) has an impact on the effectiveness of referral incentive policy and how?" In this study, we develop a queuing network model with blocking to analyze these questions. By incorporating the utility loss function of patients into the queuing network model, we noticed that given a fixed setting of referral incentive policy, the proportion of patients who will be guided to CHC in the long run will reach a balanced value, and the blocking phenomenon in GH will have great impact on this balanced proportion value.