Planning Health Resources Allocation Using A Geographic Information System

In this paper the health resource allocation problem is discussed. An object-oriented system is proposed and its implemented prototype is illustrated. It consists of two parts: a Geographical Information System, which is able to acquire and and store both geographical and socio-epidemiological information (including the resource distribution on that territory), and a Decision Support System, able to decide, using the optimization algorithms, the new resource allocation in order to obtain the best solution, optimizing the cost/benefit ratio, after having fixed the goal (e.g., the decrease of the incidence of a given disease) and constraints (e.g., a fixed budget, a given set of available resources, etc.). The object-oriented database can simulate and store different scenarios, depending on the different goals and constraints defined in the input. A user friendly interface was also implemented.