In an era where people health has been unjustly impacted by their income, age, gender, education, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, programs like the Recreovía and the Ciclovía Recreativa serve the entire community regardless of any of these factors with a health-focused approach. Accordingly, the necessity to bring healthy living into people’s daily lives has been and will continue to be a significant challenge for public health practitioners and city officials. This challenge inevitably involves assigning resources innovatively and efficiently using analytics-based techniques towards the goal of having healthier and sustainable cities. See the video of the RecreoBOG project

Contact: Andrés L. Medaglia

Related work and links:

• EpiAndes research group at Universidad de los Andes.
• Medaglia, A. L. (2017). Promoting health and wellness through OR. In IFORS News. OR-Impact Section. 11(4). ISSN: 2223-4373
• IFORS Prize for Operations Research (OR) in Development (2017). 21th Conference of the International Federations of Operational Research Societies (IFORS). Quebec City (Canada) .
• Abolghasem, S., Solano, F., Bedoya, C. D., Navas, L.P., Ríos. A. P., Pinzón. E. A., Medaglia, A. L., Sarmiento, O. L. (2018). A robust DEA-centric location-based decision support system for expanding Recreovía hubs in the city of Bogotá (Colombia). International Transactions in Operational Research.
• Abolghasem, S., Gómez-Sarmiento, J., Medaglia, A. L., Sarmiento, O. L., González, A. D., Díaz del Castillo, A., Rozo-Casas, Juan F., Jacoby, E. (2018). A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)-centric decision support system for evaluating Ciclovía-Recreativa (CR) programs in the Americas. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences. 61:90–101.
• Sefair, J. A., Molano, A., Medaglia, A. L., and Sarmiento, O. L. (2011). Locating neighborhood parks with a lexicographic multiobjective optimization method. In Community-Based Operations Research: Decision Modeling for Local Impact and Diverse Populations. Michael P. Johnson (Ed.). International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, Volume 167, Part 2, 143-171.

Different screening policies are practiced in order to early detect cervical cancer lesions, including the common cytology, HPV-DNA test and colposcopy. Each exam is characterized by its sensitivity and specificity. Moreover, it has associated direct and indirect costs. Our goal in this project is to identify since what age and with what frequency should a patient be tested with the available exams. Medical guide-lines have already been established to address this problem. However, they do not consider the imperfect information of these tests. We formulate Markov Decision Problem models that incorporate primary screening (cytology or HPV-DNA test) as methods of detection, and type I and II errors of these tests. Our results show that screening policies that outperform the existing guidelines with respect to the total expected quality-adjusted life years can be defined.

Contact: Ivan Mura

Cervical cancer is a global health issue, and developing countries bear the highest death rates. Though, cervical cancer etiology is well understood and prevention is possible. Both vaccines and effective screening tests exist, which can significantly reduce incidence. While designing cost-effective public health policies is of paramount importance in countries with limited resource availability, it requires an ability to generate reliable long-term predictions about the dynamics of a population health state, a task that entails significant complexity. This project aims at developing a simulation-based computational tool that can assist decision-makers in shaping national public health policies.

Contact: Ivan Mura