A Decision Support System for the allocation of health care resources to decrease the disease incidence in developing countries

The health resource allocation problem is discussed in this paper. An object-oriented systems is proposed and its implemented prototype is illustrated. It consists of two part: a geographical Information System, which is able to acquire and store both geographical and socio-epidemiological Information (enclosed 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 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 input. A user friendly interface was also implemented.