EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1375. Improving the location and allocation of healthcare resources

Invited abstract in session TA-15: Location planning in healthcare, stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Tuesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 18 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Marcelo de Souza
Department of Software Engineering, Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina
2. Tailini Schultz
Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina
3. Lucas Pietro Biasi Rayzer
Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina

Abstract

The appropriate location of healthcare resources and a proper allocation of patients are essential to ensure access to healthcare for as many people as possible. Examples of healthcare resources include examination and treatment equipment, and healthcare facilities, such as emergency centers. We propose an integer programming formulation for the location-allocation of healthcare resources based on the p-median location problem with additional constraints. We aim to minimize the average distance between patients and resources. Besides that, we present an iterated greedy heuristic to solve large instances. We implement different construction and destruction procedures, restart and acceptance strategies, and also a local search method to improve solutions. Based on these components, we build an algorithm framework capable of generating different versions of iterated greedy heuristics. We evaluate both the exact and heuristic approaches to real-world instances of location and allocation of examination equipment (e.g. mammography units). We use a parameter configurator to automatically search for the best iterated greedy heuristic to solve these instances, producing high-performing algorithms. The heuristic produces near-optimal solutions while solving larger instances that cannot be solved exactly in a reasonable time. Besides that, the proposed approaches can support decisions in healthcare, allowing better use of available resources and improving people's access to healthcare.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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