Improving Access to Essential Medicines via Decision-Aware Machine Learning
For healthcare systems in resource-constrained settings, this work provides a practical, low-cost tool to improve medicine allocation, with real-world evidence of impact.
The paper addresses the challenge of allocating essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries with limited data. A decision-aware machine learning framework with multi-task learning and catalytic priors was deployed in Sierra Leone, resulting in a 19% increase in consumption of allocated products and nationwide scaling covering 2 million women and children.
A critical challenge in healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is the efficient and equitable allocation of scarce resources, particularly essential medicines. This problem is complicated by limited high-quality data, which restricts the applicability of traditional data-driven techniques. We propose a novel decision-aware machine learning framework for essential medicines allocation, which additionally leverages multi-task learning to ensure sample efficiency and catalytic priors to ensure equitable allocation. In collaboration with the Sierra Leone national government, we performed a staggered, nationwide deployment of our system as a decision support tool. Our econometric evaluation finds an estimated 19% increase in consumption of allocated products in treated districts, demonstrating its efficacy at improving access to essential medicines. Our tool was subsequently scaled nationwide, covering an estimated 2 million women and children under five. Our work demonstrates how machine learning methods can improve efficiency at very low cost in resource-constrained global health settings.