A goal programming model to support the case-mix planning in state hospitals

We are proposing a goal programming model to estimate the case-mix that should be included in the Contract- program that annually subscribe the Public Hospitals and the Administration in Spain. The decision variables are the activity level of each hospital medical service and the attributes are the basic indicators that are managed when elaborating the Contract-program: financing, number of discharges, average length of stay and complexity weight. We solve our model by the EXCEL’s tool SOLVER. The use of this tool allows simulating several scenarios in an interactive way, which is very useful for the study and discussion of the quantities to contract between the Hospital and the Administration. The paper concludes with a brief presentation of the results obtained when applying our model to a hospital of the Basque Health Service.