A System to Define and Allocate Health Care Resources on a Territory to Improve the Life Quality of the Populations in Developing Countries

• Published in: Computers and biomedical research 1997-10, Vol.30 (5), p.379-402
• Main Authors: Ferri, F., Pourabbas, E., Rafanelli, M., Sindoni, G.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Biological and medical sciences; Cholera - epidemiology; Data Display; Decision Support Techniques; Decision Trees; Developing Countries; Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted; Disease Outbreaks - economics; Disease Outbreaks - prevention & control; Epidemiologic Methods; General aspects; Health Care Costs; Health Care Rationing - organization & administration; Humans; Management Information Systems; Medical sciences; Models, Statistical; Nicaragua; Planification. Prevention (methods). Intervention. Evaluation; Population Dynamics; Public health. Hygiene; Public health. Hygiene-occupational medicine; Quality of Life; Therapy, Computer-Assisted
• ISSN: 0010-4809; 1090-2368
• DOI: 10.1006/cbmr.1997.1456

In this paper the health resource allocation problem is discussed. An object-oriented system is proposed and its implemented prototype is illustrated. It consists of two parts: a Geographical Information System, which is able to acquire and store both geographical and social-epidemiological information (including the resource distribution on that territory), and a Decision Support System, able to decide, using optimization algorithms, the new resource allocation in order to obtain a quasi-optimal solution for the cost/benefit ratio minimization problem, after having fixed the goal (e.g., the decrease of the incidence of a given disease) and constraints (e.g., a fixed budget, a given set of available resources, etc.). The object-oriented database which is part of the system can simulate and store different scenarios, depending on the different goals and constraints defined in input, by means of a user friendly interface.