Equitable Community Health Worker Deployment in sub-Saharan Africa: A Modeling Framework for Stochastic Health Progression

Community health workers (CHWs) are increasingly important to healthcare delivery in many African countries. As CHW programs are being scaled up and integrated into national healthcare delivery systems, an important policy question is how to deploy CHWs to various localities, given their differences in disease burden and population density as well as the limited national resources for the program. We develop a modeling framework which jointly describes the health impact of a CHW program as a function of an area’s disease characteristics, operational environment, and CHW deployment density. Specifically, we use a continuous logistical model to capture the travel time constraints of CHWs and a novel continuous time stochastic model to describe individual health progression. We then demonstrate how our model can be used to inform policy decisions by formulating and solving an optimization problem for CHW deployment. Our numerical results demonstrate that we can prioritize equity in our deployment approach without incurring too high a price in terms of total country-wide utility.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Reubenstein, Rebecca

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jónasson, Jónas Oddur

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151513

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/151513