Optimizing Vaccination Incentives to Prevent Disease Outbreaks

该奖项将通过设计有效的机制来提高传染病疫苗接种率，从而为促进国民健康和福利做出贡献。疫苗接种是预防、控制和消除疾病最有效的公共卫生干预措施之一。本研究的目的是确定最佳的疫苗接种激励措施，以防止疾病在人群中爆发的资源限制。 高疫苗接种覆盖率的障碍包括疫苗短缺、成本、缺乏通用疫苗接种记录、依从性的复杂性、错误信息以及个人和文化信仰。 这项研究将对数百万人产生广泛影响，为政策制定者提供工具，通过序贯干预设计和有效利用医疗资源来促进疫苗接种，以改善人群健康。 本研究的跨学科性质将为学生提供多元化的教育和培训。PI将开发一个综合建模框架，该框架将通过博弈论方法，社会网络影响者识别和基于代理的大型人口感染网络模拟相结合的激励机制设计。本研究将提出多逼真度仿真优化方法，并将其应用于疫苗接种激励政策的优化，以实现基于智能体仿真的群体免疫。激励措施可能包括对所有寻求疫苗接种的个人的经济奖励，医疗保健费用分摊和/或通过教育推广对社会影响者的激励。城市和农村的用例将进行分析，以提供控制和消除麻疹在美国超越美国设置的见解，建模框架可以推广到低收入和中等收入国家。 该团队将通过在顶级期刊上发表文章、跨学科会议和目标公共卫生机构传播这项工作的成果。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award will contribute to the advancement of the national health and welfare by designing effective mechanisms to improve the vaccination rate for communicable diseases. Vaccination is one of the most effective public health interventions to prevent, control, and eliminate disease. The objective of this research is to identify optimal vaccination incentives given resource constraints to prevent disease outbreaks in a population. Barriers to high vaccination coverage include vaccine shortages, cost, lack of universal vaccination records, complexity of adherence, misinformation, and personal and cultural beliefs. This research will have broad impact on millions of individuals by providing policy makers with tools to promote vaccination uptake through sequential intervention design and effective utilization of healthcare resources to improve population health. The interdisciplinary nature of this research will provide students with diversified education and training.The PIs will develop an integrated modeling framework that combines incentive mechanism design via a game-theoretic approach, social network influencer identification, and agent-based simulation of large population infection networks. The research will advance multi-fidelity simulation optimization methods and apply them to optimize vaccination incentive policies to achieve herd immunity using the agent-based simulation. Incentives may include financial rewards to all individuals seeking vaccination, cost sharing for medical care, and/or incentives to social influencers via education outreach. Urban and rural use-cases will be analyzed to provide insights into controlling and eliminating the measles in the U.S. Going beyond the U.S. setting, the modeling framework can be generalized to low- and middle-income countries. The team will disseminate results from this work through publications in top journals, conferences across disciplines, and targeted public health agencies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.