Dr. Ian Kropp, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Ohio Northern University
Abstract:
In many rural regions of the world, there are not enough brick-and-mortar physician clinics or pharmacies to serve communities. Consequently, residents may have to travel unfeasibly long distances to access healthcare or forgo healthcare all together. Mobile medical clinics, which are large vans or caravans with clinical staff and equipment, can improve accessibility to medical services in rural areas. They are cheaper to build and maintain than brick-and-mortar clinics, and can operate at many different locations, increasing access to clinical services. However, operation of mobile clinics is an NP-Complete problem. The administrators of the mobile clinics have to choose when and where to set up mobile clinic events, and how to staff each event given a pool of personnel and their conflicting schedules. This raises conflicting objectives, including maximizing the number of patients served, minimizing overstaffing events, maximizing the number of areas visited, and minimizing the costs of operation. This challenging situation is a suitable problem for collaborative, interactive, and explainable multi-objective optimization, and we have an excellent case study. At Ohio Northern University, there is a mobile clinic which serves two of the surrounding rural counties, and the clinic's administrators are looking for a collaborative tool to remove the grunt work of clinic management. This DEMO seminar will present a preliminary a posteriori study of the mobile clinic optimization problem by Drs. Kropp and Misitano, and lay out the plan of study for incorporating interactivity and explainability into this impactful case study.
