Hire the Experts: Combinatorial Auction Based Scheme for Experts Selection in E-Healthcare

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel combinatorial auction scheme for selecting medical experts in e-healthcare, addressing the complex problem of matching multiple patients with their preferred experts while considering private costs.

Contribution

It models the experts hiring problem as a combinatorial auction, the first such approach in this domain, to optimize expert selection for multiple patients.

Findings

Proposes a new auction-based scheme for expert selection.

Addresses private preferences and costs in expert hiring.

Lays groundwork for strategic expert recruitment in healthcare.

Abstract

During the last decade, scheduling the healthcare services (such as staffs and OTs) inside the hospitals have assumed a central role in healthcare. Recently, some works are addressed in the direction of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) for the critical healthcare scenarios from outside of the medical unit, in both strategic and non-strategic settings under monetary and non-monetary perspectives. In this paper, we have tried to investigate the experts hiring problem with multiple patients and multiple experts; where each patient reports a preferred set of experts which is private information alongwith their private cost for consultancy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first step in the direction of modeling the experts hiring problem in the combinatorial domain. In this paper, the combinatorial auction based scheme is proposed for hiring experts from outside of the hospitals to have expertise by the preferred doctors set to the patients.