# Hiring Expert Consultants in E-Healthcare: A Two Sided Matching Approach

## TL;DR

This paper models the hiring of expert medical consultants in e-healthcare as a two-sided matching problem, ensuring stable, strategy-proof, and optimal allocations between patients and doctors.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel two-sided matching framework for hiring expert doctors in e-healthcare, considering strategic preferences and revealing a stable, truthful, and optimal mechanism.

## Key findings

- The proposed mechanism guarantees stable doctor-patient matches.
- The mechanism is strategy-proof, encouraging truthful preference revelation.
- Experimental validation confirms the mechanism's effectiveness.

## Abstract

Very often in some censorious healthcare scenario, there may be a need to have some expert consultancies (especially by doctors) that are not available in-house to the hospital. With the advancement in technologies (such as video conferencing, smartphone, etc.), it has become reality that, for the critical medical cases in the hospitals, expert consultants (ECs) from around the world could be hired, who will serve the patients by their physical or virtual presence. Earlier, this interesting healthcare scenario of hiring the ECs (mainly doctors) from outside of the hospitals had been studied with the robust concepts of mechanism design with or without money. We have tried to model the ECs (mainly doctors) hiring problem as a two-sided matching problem. In this paper, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we explore the more realistic two-sided matching in our set-up, where the members of the two participating communities, namely patients and doctors are revealing the strict preference ordering over all the members of the opposite community for a stipulated amount of time. We assume that patients and doctors are strategic in nature. With the theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanism that results in a stable allocation of doctors to patients is strategy-proof (or truthful) and optimal. The proposed mechanism is also validated with exhaustive experiments.