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Restless Bandits visiting Villages: A Preliminary Study on distributing Public Health Services

Biswarup Bhattacharya

Published 2018 in The Compass

ABSTRACT

Distributing public health services is a major challenge. Health workers are responsible for spreading awareness about preventable health problems among the general public by physically visiting the at-risk individuals. However, a limited number of health workers are often responsible for a large population with a variety of health problems. It is therefore essential to design an effective policy to maximize the coverage and spread of health information with limited resources. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical visitation policy design, scalable to regions of various sizes and diversities, which consists of two levels of planning: i) Macro-level planning (region-level) by adapting the p-functional regions problem (PFRP) to our setting, and ii) Micro-level planning (village-level) by formulating a restless multi-armed bandit (RMAB) model and using POMDPs with Whittle Index Policy. We also consider how to address the heterogeneity of health problems across villages to ensure better service delivery and the dynamic nature of public health priorities, which have not been attempted in previous literature, to the best of our knowledge. Our preliminary experiments show promising results which demonstrate the potential of this methodology to be applied for health policy planning.

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