title: An object oriented decision support system for the planning of health resource allocation.
abstract: The health resource allocation problem is discussed in this paper. An object-oriented system, which consists of two parts is proposed and its implemented prototype is illustrated. The first part consists of a Geographical Information System which is able to acquire and store both geographical information regarding the territory under investigation and the socio-epidemiological information and the resource distribution in that moment on the same territory. The second part refers to the strategies and the relative algorithms carried out (using a Decision Support System) to obtain the best solution (allocation of new resources optimizing the cost/benefit ratio) after that the user has fixed a goal (e.g., the decrease of the incidence of a given disease) and has defined some constraints (e.g., a fixed budget, a given set of available resources, etc.). The object-oriented database stores different scenarios, depending on the different goals and constraints defined in input. A user friendly interface was also implemented.
authors.affiliation: Istituto di Analisi del Sistemi ed Informatica, Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rafanelli
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ferri
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Maceratini
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sindoni
mesh_terms: D003658:Decision Making, Computer-Assisted; D003660:Decision Support Systems, Management; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D005843:Geography; D015276:Health Care Rationing; D006285:Health Planning; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems; D008288:Malaria / Q000628:therapy; D018511:Systems Integration