Innovative Techniques to Optimally Distribute and Package Healthcare Services for Rural and Remote Areas

该奖项的目标是在网络设计中建立一个全面的知识库，以便将所需的医疗保健资源最佳地分配、分发和包装到偏远和农村地区，因为它与供应商、服务和设备有关。所开发的技术将用于增加在这一领域解决的问题的可扩展性。具体而言，该研究将开发与整数规划和称为分支分解的数学结构相关的创新技术来解决这些问题。为此，将开发的技术与文献中的其他精确算法进行比较，以验证和评估这些技术的计算效率。如果成功，这项研究的结果将导致农村和偏远地区医疗保健网络设计的改进。特别是，这项研究将协助莱斯大学的超越传统边界项目，在非洲国家马拉维提供医疗保健服务。此外，这项研究还可能对美国各地约3800家农村卫生诊所产生重大影响。更一般地说，这项研究将提高解决与网络设计相关的计算难题的可扩展性和效率，这些问题在需求日益增长的领域有应用。因此，这项研究将对这些服务的经济可行性和提供产生变革性影响，影响公众、政府和商业部门。

The objective of this award is to establish a comprehensive knowledge base in network design for the optimal allocation, distribution, and packaging of needed healthcare resources to remote and rural locations, as it pertains to providers, services, and equipment. The developed techniques will be used to increase the scalability of problems solved in this area. Specifically, the research will develop innovative techniques related to integer programming and mathematical structures called branch decompositions to solve these problems. To this end, the developed techniques will be compared with other exact algorithms in the literature to validate and assess the computational efficacy of the techniques.If successful, the results of this research will lead to improvements in the design of healthcare networks for rural and remote locations. In particular, this research will assist Rice University's Beyond Traditional Borders program to provide healthcare services within the African country of Malawi. In addition, this research could also have a significant impact for the some 3800 rural health clinics throughout the United States. More generally, this research will increase the scalability and efficiency of solving associated computationally hard problems related to network design, which have applications in fields seeing increased demand. Thus, this research will have a transformative impact on the economic feasibility and delivery of these services, affecting the public, government and business sectors.