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

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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.