Design of Tools for Healthcare Resource Management from a Multidisciplinary Approach

MAURICIO A. PORRAS; GUILLERMO DURAND; JUAN VIRDIS

Otro; Science Summit at the 78 United Nation General Assembly; 2023

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina in March 2020, the Municipality of Bahía Blanca (Buenos Aires Province, Argentina) sought the collaboration of the Economics and Engineering of Health Systems Group (gEISS, Spanish for "grupo de Economía e Ingeniería de Sistemas de Salud"). The idea was to develop a tool for estimating the resources needed to address the pandemic, including human resources, beds, respirators, medical supplies, personal protective equipment, and more. The local authorities identified several key activities: i) review the literature to explore existing tools for calculating necessary supplies, ii) interpret the process of care for patients with COVID-19, iii) identify the materials and human resources required at each stage of the process, and iv) project infection curves to determine the number of patients who would need those healthcare resources. Unfortunately, in the literature review, no adequate developments in Spanish were found to adapt to the reality of local health systems, which encompassed the complexity of public hospitals managed and financed by the national, provincial and municipal governments, primary healthcare centers, private hospitals, and labor union-managed facilities, among others. To address this unmet need, specific tools were designed, adapted to local realities, and developed in collaboration with the actors of the health system for the effective management of the pandemic.The result was the creation of two tools: m-COVID, in which a mathematical model was implemented that generates predictions of infection curves for different scenarios and parameterizations, and i-COVID, a calculator of necessary health resources, which uses the predicted infection curves generated with m-COVID. Together, these tools offered several advantages: i) differentiation of supplies based on phases of care for COVID-19 patients, ii) integration of complementary functions of the WHO tools into a unified calculator of essential supplies, iii) adaptability to the requirements of local or regional decision-makers, iv) incorporation of current supply stock by assessing the gap between projected need and available resources, v) consideration of different scenarios based on various epidemiological models for disease spread prediction, and vi) ease and intuitively implementation. During the validation stage, the estimation of different scenarios made it possible to observe how fluctuations in infection rates impacted the potential saturation of the health system. Additionally, parameters related to distancing measures, changes in population authorized for social and preventive isolation, regulation of recreational activities, segmentation of isolation by age range, and more, were discussed.This project highlighted the importance of multidisciplinary research collaboration and served as a valuable learning experience, addressing complex health sector demands that transcend individual expertise. It showcased the usefulness of applying process system engineering tools and economic analysis to healthcare resource management, offering robust solutions and informed decision-making.