A study on the universal access to vaccines in Brazil

Abstract

In this paper, the universal access to vaccines in Brazil is discussed from an Operations Research (OR) point of view. A classic military model - the Weapon-Target Assignment (WTA) problem - is converted to a humanitarian one, where the objective is to maximize the coverage of the vaccines in the population instead of to destroy military assets. There is an enormous space for OR techniques in the whole healthcare system, as most of the planning is still hand-made, and drawn by professionals with medical background only. In addition, the healthcare data systems open new possibilities to data mining and statistical analysis. There is still a shortage of permanent programs to analyze and use this kind of statistical information for public planning. There are initiatives from the academia and public entities in this direction. In our research, the proposed model was tested with data from an original WTA problem.