Abstract

This paper seeks to develop a sales estimation model to forecast the demand for general hospitals in small and medium-sized cities. We focus on deriving the parameter λ in the Huff model, which is used in sales forecasting. When opening new hospitals in cities, actual sales can be calculated on the basis of a demand forecast. Currently, many researchers in Korea use the Huff model to estimate the sales of retail stores, but we employ it to analyze the impact of such factors as hospital size and the proximity of hospitals to consumers. We look at in what ways and to what extent these factors affect the λ calculation. From past experiments, we know that the parameter varies according to city size. By making comparisons with existing studies on large cities, we verify that consumers in small and medium-sized cities are less sensitive to travel time. Meanwhile, we determine λ to be 0.1 in the case of such cities, implying that hospital size has a greater influence on consumers than travel time does. According to existing studies, this figure is 0.38 for small and medium-sized cities and more than 1 for large cities.

Key words: Huff model, general hospitals, forecast analysis.