Optimal national prioritization policies for hospital care during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
In response to unprecedent surges in the demand for hospital care during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, health systems have prioritized COVID patients to life-saving hospital care to the detriment of other patients. In contrast to these ad hoc policies, we develop a linear programming framework to optimally schedule elective procedures and allocate hospital beds among all planned and emergency patients to minimize years of life lost. Leveraging a large dataset of administrative patient medical records, we apply our framework to the National Health System in England and show that an extra 50,750-5,891,608 years of life can be gained in comparison to prioritization policies that reflect those implemented during the pandemic. Significant health gains are observed for neoplasms, diseases of the digestive system, and injuries & poisoning. Our open-source framework provides a computationally efficient approximation of a large-scale discrete optimization problem that can be applied globally to support national-level care prioritization policies.
Date Issued
2021-08-13
Date Acceptance
2021-07-15
Citation
Nature Computational Science, 2021, 1, pp.521-531
ISSN
2662-8457
Publisher
Nature Research
Start Page
521
End Page
531
Journal / Book Title
Nature Computational Science
Volume
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Sponsor
Medical Research Council
National Institute for Health Research
Abdul Latif Jameel Foundation
Medical Research Council (MRC)
Identifier
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-021-00111-1
Grant Number
MR/R015600/1
NIHR200908
MR/R015600/1
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-08-13