Modeling time allocation for prevention in primary care

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of allocating time for prevention at the primary care level, focusing on a general practitioner (GP) practice. The basic trade-off is between improved state of the health of the population, which translates into less demand for the GP services, and a decreased capacity for curative services, which translates into increased congestion. The problem of how much time to devote to prevention is modeled as a non-linear optimization problem. As an extension of the problem, selection of preventive activities to perform among recommended alternatives is modeled using a knapsack formulation, and its application is illustrated with a numerical example.