ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Health Economics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1593398
This article is part of the Research TopicPublic Health Outcomes: The Role of Social Security Systems in Improving Residents' Health Welfare, Volume IIView all 3 articles
A Study on Collaborative Governance of Excessive Medical Care Based on Three-way Evolutionary Game and Simulation
Provisionally accepted
- 1Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao, Macau Region, China
- 2The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China
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Although China has made some progress in regulating and governing overtreatment behaviors in healthcare institutions, the issue of overtreatment remains persistent in the Chinese healthcare sector. This study takes a perspective of bounded rationality. It employs evolutionary game theory to develop a collaborative governance model that involves government regulatory departments, healthcare institutions, and patients to address overtreatment behaviors. The study analyzes the stability of each party's strategies and investigates various factors, such as fiscal subsidies, government fines, rectification costs, regulatory costs, reasonable treatment income, and overtreatment income are analyzed in terms of their impact on the strategic choices of the game participants. Additionally, the study examines the sensitivity of parameters within the three-party gaming system. The research findings suggest that when patients trust treatment outcomes and healthcare institutions are more inclined to implement appropriate treatments, government regulatory departments tend to adopt a more relaxed regulatory strategy. To effectively reduce overtreatment behaviors in healthcare institutions, increasing government fiscal subsidies, raising reasonable treatment income, and strengthening supervision and rectification efforts are crucial. The decision-making of government regulatory departments is influenced by the degree of patient trust. Therefore, improving the collaborative governance regarding overtreatment can be achieved by establishing comprehensive overtreatment laws and regulations, leveraging government regulatory functions, strengthening internal constraint mechanisms in healthcare institutions, and raising patients' awareness of their rights and supervisory responsibilities.
Keywords: excessive medical care1, collaborative governance2, evolutionary game3, simulation analysis4, Healthcare regulation
Received: 14 Mar 2025; Accepted: 26 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gong, ZHANG, Wang, WU and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Hanxiang Gong, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao, Macau Region, China
Xi Wang, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, Macao, Macau Region, China
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