Public health modeling at the centers for disease control and prevention

Abstract

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is a growing interest in promoting the use of mathematical modeling to support public health policies. This chapter presents three examples of operations research models developed and employed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. First, we discuss the Adult Immunization Scheduler, which uses dynamic programming methods to establish a personalized vaccination schedule for adults aged 19 and older. The second operations research project is a discrete event simulation model used to estimate the throughput and budget for mass vaccination clinics during the 2009-2010 H1N1 pandemic. Lastly, we describe a national HIV resource allocation model that uses nonlinear programming methods to optimize the allocation of funds to HIV prevention programs and populations.