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Faculty of Management Research Workshop; Iva Rashkova, Olin Business School (Washington University)
Details
Funding delays and fund allocations in the donor disbursement process for procurement
Iva Rashkova, Olin Business School (Washington University)
Despite substantial financial aid from international donors for procurement of health products, stockouts of life-saving drugs related to prevalent infectious diseases are still widespread in Africa. We leverage historical fund disbursement and drug procurement data from 2002 to 2013 to build a discrete-event simulation model predicting the joint impact of procurement and grant disbursement processes on national drug availability for the Global Fund’s (to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) recipient countries in Africa. This model is validated against cumulative stockout levels inferred from historical grant implementation lengths, and used to evaluate potential high-level modifications in the disbursement or procurement process.
In the second part of the talk, I will talk about a new framework linking the exogenous fund disbursement schedule to the periodic inventory procurement of multiple health products. We derive a heuristic for the dynamic allocation of funds based on index functions that quantify the trade-off between the cost of patients in critical conditions in the current period (myopic) and their benefit for future periods (lookahead). The proposed fund allocation algorithm is: optimal and asymptotically optimal under certain conditions; intuitive, easy to implement, and generalizable; incorporates all available problem information. We present numerical results that suggest the algorithm also yields near-optimal fund allocations and outperforms policies such as fixed base-stock, constant order quantity and myopic, as well as those designed for the special case of full backlogging.
Please contact faculty administration should you wish to attend.
Iva Rashkova, Olin Business School (Washington University)
Despite substantial financial aid from international donors for procurement of health products, stockouts of life-saving drugs related to prevalent infectious diseases are still widespread in Africa. We leverage historical fund disbursement and drug procurement data from 2002 to 2013 to build a discrete-event simulation model predicting the joint impact of procurement and grant disbursement processes on national drug availability for the Global Fund’s (to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) recipient countries in Africa. This model is validated against cumulative stockout levels inferred from historical grant implementation lengths, and used to evaluate potential high-level modifications in the disbursement or procurement process.
In the second part of the talk, I will talk about a new framework linking the exogenous fund disbursement schedule to the periodic inventory procurement of multiple health products. We derive a heuristic for the dynamic allocation of funds based on index functions that quantify the trade-off between the cost of patients in critical conditions in the current period (myopic) and their benefit for future periods (lookahead). The proposed fund allocation algorithm is: optimal and asymptotically optimal under certain conditions; intuitive, easy to implement, and generalizable; incorporates all available problem information. We present numerical results that suggest the algorithm also yields near-optimal fund allocations and outperforms policies such as fixed base-stock, constant order quantity and myopic, as well as those designed for the special case of full backlogging.
Please contact faculty administration should you wish to attend.
Where
Bayes Business School, 106 Bunhill Row
2005
106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ, UK
Speakers
Iva Rashkova
Iva Rashkova is an Assistant Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management at Olin Business School, Washington University in St Louis. She holds a PhD in Management Science and Operations from London Business School and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Economics from California Institute of Technology. Her research interests in healthcare and sustainability include funding and capacity allocations in pharmaceutical supply chains, as well as product line decisions in food supply chains.