The Design and Analysis of Pediatric Vaccine Formularies: Theory and Practice
The first problem models a general childhood immunization schedule to design a vaccine formulary that minimizes the cost of fully immunizing a child. The second problem models a general childhood immunization schedule to design a vaccine formulary that safely immunizes a child against several infectious diseases by restricting or limiting extraimmunization (i.e., extra doses of vaccine). These problems are vitally important since the cost of vaccinating a child contributes to the underimmunization of children, and extraimmunization poses biological risks, amplifies philosophical concerns with vaccination, and creates an unnecessary economic burden on society. These models are rigorously analyzed and several algorithms---both exact and heuristic---are presented. Furthermore, a computational comparison of these algorithms is presented for the 2006 Recommended Childhood Immunization Schedule as well as several randomly generated childhood immunization schedules. The third problem combines the first two problems by modeling a general childhood immunization schedule to design a vaccine formulary that minimizes the cost of fully immunizing a child while restricting or limiting extraimmunization. The results reported here provide both fundamental insights to the operations research community as well as practical value for the public health community.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign