Hiring Expert Consultants in E-Healthcare With Budget Constraint

The expert advices or consultancies by the expert consultants (ECs) for any critical situation in healthcare are the most important event that occurs on a daily basis in the hospitals. As the success of any critical operation (or surgery) is heavily dependent on ECs, so they can be thought of as one of the crucial elements of the healthcare domain. In many critical situations, there may be a need to hire some ECs from outside of the hospital to provide their expertise to the needy patient(s) that are in-house to the hospital. Earlier this interesting situation of hiring ECs (mainly doctors) from outside of the hospital has been studied under both monetary environment (with infinite budget) and nonmonetary environment (with zero budget). In this paper, a two pass algorithm is proposed for the fixed budget case, for the first time, in healthcare domain. In the first pass it is ensured that a substantial number of ECs must be aware of this hiring concept, so that they can participate in the bidding process and in the second pass, ECs are allocated to a patient satisfying its budget limit and it is interesting to note that the proposed algorithm satisfies truthfulness, individual rationality, and budget feasibility. Through exhaustive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate our proposed mechanisms.